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Though Thanos didn't appear until the very end of The Avengers, Vulture has learned that he'll emerge in the first act of Guardians of the Galaxy. Thanos will be communicating remotely via hologram for most of the film — a move the Mad Titan likely cribbed from the equally enigmatic Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — though he does show up in the purple flesh for a scene that also features Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) and Nebula (Karen Gillan), who do Thanos's bidding and serve as the primary adversaries in Guardians. Still, though Thanos is only briefly glimpsed throughout Guardians, his presence is palpable throughout: Characters reference him often and fearfully, and he has familial ties to Gamora (Zoe Saldana), our green-skinned female lead.

The movie also presents another one of the Infinity Stones that Thanos is trying to retrieve to assemble his powerful Gauntlet. In the comics, there are six such items — gems that can manipulate Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, Time, and Power — and in the closing credits tag of Thor: The Dark World, the mysterious Collector (Benicio Del Toro) came into possession of one of them, the swirling Aether, and announced "One down, five to go." We've likely seen two other Infinity Stones in the Marvel cinematic universe thus far — the glowing Tesseract featured in Captain America and The Avengers, which corresponds to the Space Stone, and Loki's blue-hued, do-my-bidding scepter, which may be the Mind Stone — and Guardians offers a fourth, which Del Toro's character helpfully identifies as the Power Stone. (Fans had previously speculated that the Aether might be the Power Stone; it's now more likely that the mysterious, floating item from Thor: The Dark World will serve as the Reality Stone in this series.)