The 'Lost' Guardians Of The Galaxy Easter Egg Reportedly Discovered

UPDATE 08/19/2017: James Gunn has denied that this is the real lost easter egg.

For years, Guardians of the Galaxy writer and director James Gunn has insisted that there's a reference hidden in the superhero flick, a so-called "lost" easter egg, that no one has ever found. Until now (or so it's been said). 

ScreenCrush producer and editor Ryan Arey has released a video claiming he's unearthed the infamous easter egg, the result of a process that drove him almost completely mad. "I've gone crazy looking for this thing... I went full John Nash and almost drowned a baby. I tried to decode stellar designations, read academic papers on binary elliptical stars in the Andromeda galaxy, and framed... the explosion of this cocoon hoping to see Adam Warlock's face," Arey said of his endeavors. 

Dramatics aside, after researching and speculating on countless fan theories, memorizing scenes and dialogue, and combing through each and every frame of the film, Arey found the easter egg in the scene where Benicio del Toro's character, the Collector, explains the Infinity Stones. The Collector shows the Guardians (and the audience) a creature known as a Celestial using the Power Stone to wipe out a planet. 

But who exactly are the Celestials? They're "2,000-foot tall Tron characters with phenomenal cosmic powers," as Arey put it. More specifically, in Marvel comics lore, the Celestials are extremely powerful extraterrestrial beings who have influenced pivotal events in the in-comic human history, including spurring the off-shoot races the Eternals and the Deviants. They're also responsible for the emergence of super-humans, the X-Gene, and beneficial mutation, as seen in Bruce Banner's post gamma-ray transformation into the Hulk. Additionally, the Celestials decide which planets' people live and die—a key aspect in Arey's speculation. 

Arey zoomed into the planet the Celestials destroy in Guardians of the Galaxy and realized that the inhabitants dress and run like Jedi from the Star Wars world, and that the planet's architecture vaguely resembles Asgard. Star Wars is out of the question, and we know it's not actually Asgard, since that location isn't a "purple wasteland." However, the planet looks really familiar and, as it turns out, has a deep connection to the Thor universe. 

It's here where Arey dropped the bombshell: the planet seen in Guardians of the Galaxy is Jotunheim, the same frost giant Chris Hemsworth's Thor attacked in an earlier Thor movie. 

Arey took things another step further when he spotted a face to the left of the screen during the "blowing up Jotunheim" scene. When the Power Stone destroys people, they're completely ripped to shreds, but the man in question isn't being torn apart. Some fans have speculated that this is Thanos, but Gunn has denied such claims. 

With that in mind, Arey looked for additional clues to find out his identity. Lucky for him, the answer lied in a marking on the man's cheek, the same one seen on the Frost Giants of Jotunheim. But not just any Frost Giant—Laufey, King of the Frost Giants and the father of Loki. 

"In summary, the Celestials went to Jotunheim early in its civilization and found it unworthy. They purge[d] the planet, while the strongest among them evolve[d] into ice-wielding bada–es," Arey concluded. 

Unfortunately, this isn't the infamous lost easter egg. Fans began forwarding Gunn the link to Arey's video, stating that it's "gotta be the easter egg everyone's been talking about." Gunn shot the speculation down on Twitter with a simple, "Nope. Sorry." 

Still, this is a fun theory to hear, and it also means that the real easter egg is still waiting to be found. Until we discover the actual truth, take a look at the small details in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 only true fans noticed.