Avengers: Infinity War - Mysteries Answered

3. How Did The Red Skull Get To Vormir?

Marvel Studios

Of all the surprises Infinity War managed to bring, Red Skull's presence on Vormir has to be its biggest.

Presumed dead in the wake of Captain America: The First Avenger and in light of Hugo Weaving's criticism of Marvel Studios, Red Skull looked as though he'd already made his last contribution to the Marvel Universe, with his legacy continued under Hydra in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. That clearly wasn't the case though in Avengers: Infinity War, with Skull playing a pivotal role as the guardian of the Soul Stone on the planet Vormir. It's his words that make Thanos sacrifice Gamora to retrieve the gem, and while he's unseen for the rest of the film, he made one heck of an impression.

The character, now played by Ross Marquand, has been imbued with new powers, a ghostly new look and with the new title of Stonekeeper. The answer itself is provided at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, where the character is sucked up into the Tesseract shortly after it projects a cosmic map onto his flying wing. Theories had abounded in the years since contemplating the character's destination, but Infinity War illustrates that the Cosmic Cube (also known as the Space Stone) had sent him to Vormir directly to safeguard its relative.

Interesting to note is that the Skull touches the Tesseract as he's dying. Sensing his impending demise, it's likely that the Stone sent the Skull to the one place where his presumably soulless self could survive - hence all the new powers and ghostly presence.

There's also the fact that in the comics Vormir is located within the Kree Galaxy. What's Captain Marvel set around? The Kree-Skrull War. The galaxy itself comprises dozens of planets of course, but when you also consider that Samuel L. Jackson mentioned that Nick Fury (who will also star in Captain Marvel) had been "trying to figure out what The Skull is going to..." in an interview the other year, there's a chance that we'll see more of his development in that film as well.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.