By Robbie Graham
In the March 2012 British print edition of Empire magazine The Avengers producer Kevin Feige swats down longstanding rumours that the movie’s yet-to-be-revealed bad guys are the Skrulls – a green, knobbly-chinned race of alien shapeshifters.
“It’s not Skrulls,” Feige tells Empire, “I’ve been clear about that. Beyond that, we want to hide it. The identity of the alien race is not impactful. It exists in the comic books, but we’re not setting-up the Kree-Skrull war or anything like that.”
The Kree are a blue-skinned, humanoid race of aliens who for eons have been at war with the Skrulls and who have tangled with The Avengers in Marvel’s past – “so it could be them,” Empire speculates.
Empire’s guess work doesn’t end there, however: “It could also be the Shi'ar, a race commonly associated with The X-Men, but rights issues might make that difficult. And then there’s the bigger question: is Loki [Thor’s brother] the only major villain in the movie?” The mag then considers whether the “galactic powerhouse” Thanos might also make an appearance.
Despite Kevin Feige’s denial, it now appears that the Skrulls may indeed feature in The Avengers. While at Toy Fair 2012 this week, MTV Geek photographed the soon-to-be-released Avengers board game, which is based on the movie, revealing play figures it notes are “the spitting image of the shape-shifting Skrulls!”
