6 Places The Soul Stone Might Turn Up In The MCU

Since the Tesseract and the Aether were identified as Infinity Stones in the mid-credits stinger of Thor: The Dark World, the shiny and ill-defined McGuffins have been the focus of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

While the first Phase of the embarrassingly successful franchise was based around introducing and then assembling the individual Avengers, Phase Two largely revolved around the immensely powerful gems, and with the Time Stone playing a large part in last year's Doctor Strange, Phase Three looks set to do the same.

Five of the six Infinity Stones are now accounted for; the Space Stone, or Tesseract, is in Odin's vault in Asgard; the Reality Stone, or Aether, is in the possession of the Collector; the Power Stone is being guarded by the Nova Corps on Xandar; the Mind Stone is in the Vision's forehead; and the Time Stone, or the Eye of Agamotto, is currently in the sorcerer stronghold of Kamar-Taj in Nepal.

The final stone, the orange Soul Stone, has yet to appear in the MCU, and with Thanos' rumble with our favourite heroes rapidly approaching, it had to turn up sooner rather than later.

Here are the six most likely locations, ranked from least to most likely.

In the original comics, the Soul Gem was guarded by Adam Warlock, an immensely powerful cosmic entity who has bafflingly still not appeared in the MCU, save for a brief and unconfirmed cameo of his cocoon (it's a long story) in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Going on comic lore alone, Warlock seems the most logical person to introduce the Soul Stone into the MCU. However, James Gunn has gone on record as saying that he will not appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which only leaves Avengers: Infinity War for him to be introduced in, and that film is already bursting at the seams with characters.

Another strike against Warlock is that the "powerful being created by science with a magical gem in his forehead" niche is already being filled by the Vision, and it's unlikely that Kevin Feige and co. would want to introduce another, ridiculously similar character this late in the game.

Likelihood: 2/10