Corona | Coming Attractions

We're three months out from the May 4 release of The Avengers and we still don't know the story details on what brings Marvel movies' mightiest heroes together. OK, we know that Loki, the chief villain in last summer's Thor movie is in The Avengers, and Loki is there to cause trouble. But who are all those armored bad guys we saw in the Superbowl trailer last week? Why are they flying around in ships blasting Manhattan's skyline? Are they aliens? Extra-dimensional bad guys from Asgard under Loki's command? Or somebody/something new to the Marvel movie universe?

MTV thinks that they have finally solved the riddle of who Loki's henchmen are, and they have photographic evidence to support their claim that the invading force in The Avengers movie will be Skrulls. These shape-changers are aliens that have been around for decades in Marvel's comic books, first showing up to plague the Fantastic Four in their second issue.

MTV points to images they took of an Avengers movie board game tie-in that they took at ToyFair. In the photos we see an assortment of board figures that are bright pink, with horn-like protrusions emerging from the side of their skulls, and armed with mean-looking rifles. Could these be the movie version of The Skrulls?

ToyFair has long been a place where attendees get a glimpse of licensed products from upcoming blockbuster movies. There's a good chance that someone working for Jakks Pacific (the company that has The Avengers "Mighty Battle Skill & Strategy board game" license) didn't know that they weren't supposed to let the Skrulls out of their tied-off marketing bag. Alternatively, maybe the board game needed extra villains identified for the purposes of the gameplay, and someone picked these pink guys. It's not like they're a 100% match for the comic book Skrulls we've seen.

It's also worth making a note of what other copy is on the board game's cover: "Battle of the Cosmic Cube". That also might be an unintentional reveal as to the motivations of Loki and why he's attacking the Earth.

The last we saw of the Cosmic Cube, it was being picked up by Howard Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man's daddy, after Captain America disappeared in the arctic near the end of World War II.

(It should also be noted that in the Captain America movie, the Cosmic Cube was called a tesseract...which may add weight that the Jakks board game isn't using all of the movie continuity for its setting.)

See more of the mysterious images.