So those definitely look like Skrulls in that Avengers movie toy tie-in… but Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has said that the movie will definitely not feature Skrulls. What’s going on? Well, the answer may revolve around legalities and, fittingly for shape-changing aliens who’re known for invading things secretly, disguises. The Skrulls, you see, originally appeared in a Fantastic Four story, which legally means that their movie rights are held by Fox as part of its Fantastic Four license – at least until such rights revert back to Marvel, whenever that will be – so they can’t appear in Avengers… kinda sorta.
After all, Marvel has another Skrull race not called Skrulls, thanks to The Ultimates. Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch introduced the Chitauri, a race of shape-changing aliens who were known on some worlds as “Skrull” in the first volume of their run, remember? And these guys are definitely not part of any Fantastic Four licensing deal… Considering the various cues Marvel’s movie universe has taken from the Ultimate line to date, it’s not too much of a stretch to guess that we’ll see a Chitauri invasion force in the movie, and if they happen to resemble the Skrulls quite a bit…? Well, come on: Alien shapechangers, am I right? Who knows what crazy ears they like to grow for fun.
February 14th, 2012 at 12:51 pm
This wouldn’t be the first time that an adaptation was forced to use a substitute. I remember an episode of the 1960s FF cartoon that adapted a Namor guest shot, but used different names for the Atlanteans because the rights to Namor were with the producers of the cheap Marvel cartoons of the same era.
February 14th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
and there’s the precedent of not calling the cosmic cube the cosmic cube in the cap movie and calling it…whatever it was they called it.
February 14th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
They called it the tesseract, iirc.
Which is another fancy word for cubic prism, a 4-dimensional cube, of which the Cosmic Cube would certainly apply.
February 14th, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Yeah I’m not sure this is news since it has been widely reported about Skrulls being part of the FF license. But I am guessing they will go with Chitauri.
February 14th, 2012 at 7:12 pm
oh man i really hope they are the Badoon.
February 14th, 2012 at 8:59 pm
the most stat-unfriendly organization in baseball, which is a losing strategy for a small market team
February 15th, 2012 at 8:25 am
There was some post over on Bleeding Cool (I think) that stated they might actually be some creature from one of the Nine Realms that was part of Simonson’s run on Thor. They provided scans of the movie with Simonson’s design for those creatures and they kinda seemed similar as well…Would make sense if Loki’s army consisted of creatures from the Nine Realms…Either way, Avengers is looking swwweeeeeet.
February 15th, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Graeme, I don’t think they go with the name: ‘Chitauri’ as Mark Millar took that from David Icke’s books- I would imagine they’d have to use a different name.
February 24th, 2012 at 8:26 pm
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