Welcome back to Speculation Corner, where The A.V. Club presents some oblique image or news from the world of pop culture and then exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of it, because life is a finite commodity and existence passes by vanishingly fast, and who wants to be lying on their deathbed, whispering to their grandchildren, “I’ll always regret not spending more time speculating about that Avengers: Infinity War set photo the Russo Brothers tweeted out nearly a year before the movie was released”? Not us, that’s for certain! So let’s take a closer look at this picture the directors of the upcoming Marvel all-hands-on-deck crossover event unveiled to the world, and see if we can’t guess correctly just what the hell it is.
There are a couple of dominant theories as to what we’re looking at in the above image. One is that this is the entrance to Thanos’ vault where he keeps the Infinity Gauntlet, a room we briefly saw the inside of during the mid-credits stinger from Avengers: Age Of Ultron. That would make sense, be thematically relevant, and tie in nicely to something people have already seen—i.e. it would make for exactly the kind of fun but silly easter egg that constitutes a decent teaser pic.
The second possibility, one being floated by Comic Book Movie, is that this is the central node of a new Iron Man suit capable of flying in space, given that a portion of the film is all but assured to take place off-planet. It’s possible, but the seeming wall surrounding the circle makes us think this is much larger than the front of a suit, thereby providing more credence to the first theory.
Of course, that negates the potential for this image to just be an example of what roulette tables look like in the future. That is also very much an option. Or a very well-crafted fondant cake, built for robots. Let’s not foreclose any promising avenues of thought. Avengers: Infinity War should clear this up when it comes out next year, although by then reshoots may have rendered this whole debate moot.