Avengers 5 plot was teased in Endgame Easter egg, according to fan theory

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have previously dropped a similar hint

The premise for the next Avengers film may have already been revealed in an Easter egg found in Avengers: Endgame.

At least that’s according to a new theory that has emerged ollowing one eagle-eyed Marvel viewer’s social media post.

Reddit user u/wafflespls recently shared two images of the Hulk. The first is from last year’s Endgame, in which the Hulk-Bruce Banner hybrid “Professor Hulk” is seen holding up the wreckage of Avengers HQ to prevent it from collapsing. The second shows Hulk from a specific panel in a Marvel comic book, holding up a mountain.

The two photos were captioned with the comment, “This can’t be a coincidence, right?”

Culture website Inverse explained how the parallel seems to refer to the popular Avengers comic series Secret Wars, the cover of which featured Hulk holding aloft the mountain.

Previous Marvel films have also been based on specific comic book series, including Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War.

At a Los Angeles screening of Infinity War back in 2018, Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo said that they would only return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe if they could direct a film adaptation of Secret Wars.

Some fans also identified an apparent reference to Secret Wars in last year’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, when a grid of several different Spider-Man outfits briefly pictured what many claimed was the character’s black outfit from the Secret Wars comics.

While no new Avengers films have been announced, it is widely expected that Marvel will revive their mammoth crossover franchise within the next few years, with Avengers 5 potentially hitting screens in 2024.

Another fan theory recently suggested that Thanos could return in a future Avengers film, based on a detail contained in one of Endgame‘s deleted scenes.

This week, Marvel confirmed the status of the Infinity Stones in an Instagram post, after people had speculated that they could be reassembled on an atomic level following their apparent destruction in Endgame.

You can read The Independent‘s ranking of all the Marvel superheroes here.