I Don’t Care What They Say, Those Are Skrulls in The Avengers

As we’ve reported earlier, the cat is finally out of the bag about those mysterious aliens from The Avengers, and it turns out that they’re none other than the Ultimate Universe’s Chitauri. Now, if you’re not familiar with these shape shifting beasties, then allow me to fill you in.  

Back in 2002 Mark Millar introduced the world to a brand new version of Marvel’s most beloved superhero team with The Ultimates, a darker, trendier, grittier version of The Avengers. Well, it just so happens that Millar wanted to pit our heroes against an invading alien horde, and he decided the Skrulls would be the perfect extra-terrestrials for the job, but he didn’t really like the name “Skrull“. So, he swapped that with the term “Chitauri“, revamped their history (as is expected for any Ultimate Universe version of a character or, in this case, race), and threw them into an epic battle with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s resident superhero group.

But… people tend to forget that the Chitauri are, in fact, still Skrulls!!! So when folks like Joss Whedon and Kevin Feige publicly declare that those galaxy hopping creeps won’t play a role in their film, one would naturally dismiss the Chitauri as well, but they obviously didn’t.  Now that we all know about the aliens, though, Joss Whedon has been forced to do some damage control. Check out this comment from a recent press conference (thanks to our friends at CBM for the transcript)…

“The alien race are the Chitauri — or a version of them — because they are not one of the key races and they don’t have a storied history. That wasn’t the point. I know this debate will go on long after I’m dead. I would say it was the Kree–Skrull race.”

As you can see, Whedon is sticking to his guns on this one, but I don’t care! The villains in The Avengers are still Skrulls in my book.