Avengers: Infinity War ended with Thanos’ shocking victory (which wasn’t actually all that shocking to anyone who had read Infinity Gauntlet #1 in 1991), after he succeeded in assembling all six Infinity Stones from across the galaxy and using them to snap away half of all life in the universe. He then teleported away to the tranquility of Planet 0259-S, where, the remaining battered Avengers later discovered, he did something perhaps even more shocking: he used the power of the Infinity Stones one more time to destroy them, reducing them to atoms and scattering their energy across the cosmos so that they could never be used to undo his triumph.
That then set the stage for the audacious chronocaper that made up the second act of last year’s Avengers: Endgame, which culminated in the improbable retrieval of previous versions of the Stones, allowing the unified persona of Bruce Banner and the Hulk to snap all of the Mad Titan’s victims back to life before Tony Stark ultimately used them to obliterate a time-displaced Thanos and his forces at the cost of his own life.
Now, Redditor Ghostaire has presented a compelling theory suggesting that the Hulk did more than just double the population of the universe when he snapped his fingers in 2023. Comparing the massive amount of damage that Banner sustained to the amount of damage Thanos endured when he destroyed the Stones, the theory proposes that “the Hulk didn’t just bring everyone back. He also restored the Stones.”
Based partly on information about the Stones that the Ancient One had given only to Banner, the hypothesis actually complements what we already know about the premise of next year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which involves, in part: “after the events of Avengers: Endgame, Dr. Stephen Strange continues his research on the Time Stone.”
Coupled with the fact that we also witnessed Loki escape in Avengers: Endgame following the Battle of New York in 2012 using the Space Stone, thereby creating a divergent timeline in the multiverse that Doctor Strange is set to explore, and the fact that the Loki series on Disney+ is said to connect in a significant way to Multiverse of Madness, the notion that the Hulk used previous versions of the Infinity Stones to restore the Stones that Thanos destroyed may not that be all that farfetched after all.
Unless we learn something more when The Eternals debuts this November 6th though, it looks like we’ll have to wait until 2021 to see if this theory pans out, as Loki is set to debut early that year with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness following on May 7th, 2021.