It’s been 158 days since Avengers: Infinity War, the best movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (fight me), premiered in theaters. And for the past 158 days we’ve all been theorizing and rewatching the movie, desperate for clues, hints, subtle easter eggs, any scrap of anything that might tell us what the 2019 untitled Avengers movie could bring. We’ve found some good ones, but the most interesting (and possibly most telling) fan theory didn’t emerge until this past August when eagle-eyed fans seemed to spot a version of Captain Marvel’s signature sash tied around Obsidian’s waist.
A subtle Captain Marvel easter egg would make perfect sense
As we know from that telling post-credits beeper scene in Infinity War, Captain Marvel is going to be a major player in the upcoming Avengers movie. Her own solo movie, set to premiere in March 2019, looks all sorts of iconic from one trailer alone. We’ve already determined she is inarguably the strongest Avenger in the MCU. This woman is a big deal, so it would make perfect sense to include a very subtle Carol Danvers-centric easter egg to whet fans’ appetites and give some tiny contextual clue about how she’ll figure into the Avengers story — maybe she’s crossed paths with Thanos and the Black Order before, and that will give her some kind of upper hand in the next movie.
Plus, we know from the comics that Carol hates it when people take her stuff. Woe betide the dude who messes with Carol’s stuff.
But the sad truth is that the cloth doesn’t have anything to do with Captain Marvel. We chatted with Ryan Meinerding, Marvel’s Head of Visual Development, and Andy Park, Marvel’s Director of Visual Development, during an event celebrating the October 2 Digital and Blu-Ray release of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Here’s everything we learned.
The sash isn’t Captain Marvel’s, and it’s actually orange
“Obsidian has a piece of cloth trailing from that circle, but it’s just an orange piece of cloth,” Meinerding confirmed. “It’s meant to be orange in the design, so it wasn’t specifically intended to be [about] Captain Marvel — not that I’m aware of.”
Park added that the team was surprised when they first saw the theory online. “But also a lot of things are a surprise for us,” he laughed.
The sash was meant to give Obsidian’s character more depth
“The note from Kevin Feige [president of Marvel Studios] about [Obsidian] was to try to make him be a little bit more than another shirtless guy swinging something heavy around,” Meinerding explained. “So we ended up putting more clothes and armor and different things on him to make him feel more like a bounty hunter and weapons expert. It was an effort to try and give him more costume to make him feel more like a tangible character — which is what we were trying to do with all of the Black Order.”
So, there you have it. But Carol is still the strongest Avenger and you still must never, ever, ever mess with her stuff.