The MCU Just Repeated a Moment From the 2012 Marvel Movie 12 Years Later and Completely Inverted It

An iconic scene from MCU Phase 1 will be repeated with a brilliant twist in the next Marvel Studios film Rays* film. Marvel Studios has released the latest special look at Rays* in November 2024, revealing more about the highly anticipated crossover film that is set to release in May 2025 as part of Phase 5 of the MCU. Rays* will bring together several reformed villains and anti-heroes from MCU history in a brilliant crossover event, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ enigmatic Valentina Allegra de Fontaine seemingly at the center of the action.

Little is known about Valentina, although her previous brief appearances in projects such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever discovered a mysterious secret agenda. Valentina is the Director of the CIA in the MCU, but she has established a strange connection with several super-powered and specially gifted individuals, perhaps for nefarious purposes.. Damn*’ special visual from the 2024 D23 Brasil event revealed something huge about Valentina in the MCU, which distorts an iconic moment from Phase 1 The Avengers.

Val repeats (and turns) the bar scene from Tony Stark’s Avengers in Thunderbolts *

Thunderbolts* trailer reveals that Valentina bought Avengers Tower

The new owner of Avengers Tower has remained a mystery in the MCU since the landmark was sold in 2017. Spider-Man: Homecomingbut Rays’ trailers confirm that Valentina purchased the building. Avengers Tower was first seen in The Avengers and became a central location during the Battle of New York when Loki used its arc reactor to power his Tesseract portal. Before the Battle of New York, Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark briefly chatted with Loki while preparing a drink in the future Avengers Tower bar, and this scene was repeated in Damn*’ new trailer.

This moment can be seen as a way to show that Tony Stark’s legacy lives on in the MCU, even though his alcohol abuse narratives from Marvel Comics were never fully adapted into the MCU. Instead, Valentina directly references the Battle of New York in Damn*’ new trailer, noting that many battles took place in that exact location. In The Avengers, not only did Tony Stark fight Loki in the Tower’s bar, but it was also here that Loki was eventually brought to his knees by the Hulk, and the site of the Avengers’ first battle against Ultron in 2015.

Thunderbolts * Reversing the Avengers bar scene makes perfect sense for the MCU film

The Thunderbolts are a dark mirror of the Avengers

Now, it looks like the Avengers Tower bar will witness a fight between Valentina and the Thunderbolts themselves, and this is the perfect mirror of The Avengers original battle in the MCU. The Thunderbolts are the perfect antithesis of the Avengers, with many of them being dark mirrors of the original Avengers members.then twisting this iconic scene into Rays* it makes logical and thematic sense. It will be interesting to revisit Avengers Tower in Phase 5 of the MCU, see what it has become in the years since it was last seen, and see what epic fight will happen next.