Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-217.55.64.90-20150327010210/@comment-1298029-20150405192639

Yeah, Strucker is in. Too much talking about him's been done to leave him out.

But I question the usefulness of yet another 10-sec scene with Thanos. I think four or so was enough, and they should either have him in in a regular role (they kinda sorta had in Guardians, but I still call that a borderline cameo), which is unlikely to have any place in what is essentially a "Tony Stark screws up again" movie, or defer his next appearance to such time when he can actually be useful to the story. That, I think, should come around in the next Avengers, "Infinity War", which is apparently so hyped-up that it will be a two-parter, despite also being part of the universe's "prime" sub-series (as all other movies so far (except Guardians) feed into the Avengers series).

Judging from the title there, Thanos' appearance is extremely likely, as the doodads he's obsessed with and which are essentially the central MacGuffins of MCU are canonically called the Infinity Stones (and no, that's not a Rolling Stones revival, nor a new and more potent (pardon the pun) potency drug). The name doesn't come up much in the CU, as it's one of those names that look fine in a comic book, but would sound silly in a live-action movie set in the (mostly) real world. Nonetheless, the Tesseract (Cpt. America, Avengers), the Aether (Thor 2), and the purple thingy (Guardians) are all part of the MCU's ultimate collector's (pardon the pun & sorry, Benicio) set, the Infinity Stones.

So, it's logical to expect that an infinity war will be a fight over these "stones", and if so, then Thanos will most likely be the proximate (i.e., immediately acting, as opposed to e.g. the use of lackeys as in Avengers (where his lackey was puny, no pun on Hulk intended) & Guardians (where his lackey turned out to be slightly too insane to be controllable)) villain.