Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

"Don't say gay" = "Don't educate mutate" or some such nonsense.

 

If you teach the kids about radicals like Charles Xavier they're going to turn into mutants themselves.

 

I don't need my kids being taught about Critical Mutation Theory in school.

 

Now that would be interesting, and brings to mind both Spidey's fate in No Way Home and the whole 'Where the hell were you during Thanos?' backlash Eternals faced. "We have always been among you." Have the whole human race gotten the MiB neuralyzer treatment from Xavier/Cerebro - Jean Grey's childhood x 8 billion? The X-Men mentally/digitally scrubbed out of every MCU movie they were never in? If so, and that memory block is now being lifted, that would slot the X-Men retroactively into the MCU with minimal setup needed (we've seen the cartoon, we know the characters and backstories) and definitely spark instant Man vs. Mutant animosity.

 

I don't know if I see something like that happening, I'm thinking either they've been living in secret, and something happens that forces them into open, or they're from an alternate universe.

 

I don't see how the animated series could be canonical in the MCU except as an alternate reality. The show used the comics' backstory where Rogue permanently stole Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel's powers and put her in a coma for years, which is irreconcilable with the MCU's Carol. It also had a flashback episode to Wolverine and Captain America fighting Red Skull in WWII, contradicting the MCU version of those characters. It also had brief cameos by many later MCU characters including (white) Nick Fury, War Machine, Doctor Strange, Thor, Spider-Man, Hulk (as a Danger Room robot), Punisher, Ghost Rider, and an Avengers team including Daredevil, Black Widow, Wasp, and Giant-Man.

Also, the contemporaneous Spider-Man animated series had several episodes crossing over with characters from X-Men, putting both series in the same universe (Earth-92131, per the wiki), although X-Men never afforded more than a glimpse of Spidey's arm shooting webbing.

Besides, if all the X-Men stories told in the animated series had already happened in the MCU, then that would preclude future MCU movies from doing their own versions of many classic X-Men storylines.

But I gather...

Spoiler: Multiverse of Madness

The Illuminati in the new Doctor Strange movie include Patrick Stewart as Xavier, but he's in the animated Xavier's green suit and yellow hoverchair and accompanied by an arrangement of the animated series's theme. So maybe he's meant to be the Xavier from Earth-92131 instead of the one from the Fox movie universe. Maybe that's what they mean by the animated series being part of MCU canon. As with the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths, the multiverse conceit allows saying that all previous screen adaptations are part of the same canon.

 

Spoiler: Re:Multiverse of Madness

Kamen's theme for the first film was an adaptation of the '90s series theme.

 

More accurate to call it a pastiche. Not the same melody, but close enough to recognize the allusion.

 

Spoiler

That was how I took the comment after I saw the movie, that it would potentially be the backstory for the 838, not the 616 version.

 

Maybe adapt the House of X storyline and reveal that Xavier has been mentally blocking humans from knowing about or remembering mutants until they reveal themselves. Like in the comics, Xavier has learned that in other timelines the mutants always end up going extinct. It could even let them reference the Fox films which always seemed to end with mutants on the verge of extinction. But now they have their own nation and the world wakes up to realize that an entirely new human species with powers they can't understand has been living besides them.

 

Except

Spoiler

I can't see X-Men TAS being part of Earth 838, since X-Men The Animated Series is canon with Spider-Man The Animated series, which established Steve Rogers as Captain America (no Captain Carter) and Baron Mordo as a white guy, and X-Men itself established Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel, which doesn't fit with the Illuminauti's Maria Rambeau.

I think that the 838 Xavier is a variant similar to the animated series Xavier, but that X-Men TAS itself couldn't have happened on Earth 838.

 

God we're nerds

 

I am too old to have seen the x-men cartoon so none of theis means anything to me. Interesting discussion though because I'm still a nerd.

 

Elizabeth Olsen on playing Wanda in the film.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-...lsen-interview-doctor-strange-2-b2072025.html

Some pretty good insight into her frame of mind on Marvel

She stands up for the large crews who work on these movies when people like Martin Scorcese downgrades the movies as nothing more than "theme park rides"

 

The problem with the X-Men hiding away all these years is that it makes them colossal assholes. At least the Eternals had the excuse that Arishem would've stopped them if they tried to interfere.

 

Maybe the X-Men were helping out during all the Thanos stuff, but then Xavier mind-wiped everyone cause he's an assholewants to keep mutankind a secret.

 

You know, since in MCU chronology it's been, what, maybe 7-8 years since the Snap, you could say that the Snap somehow activated mutant genes in a segment of the population and they're only now starting to be discovered. People like Xavier and Logan could be rare, naturally occurring mutants who were small enough in number to remain secret, but now that they're proliferating, Xavier could open a school to guide them.

 

The way I would go is establish that there have been mutants all along, but in very small numbers. Say, one in every hundred million. Establish the x-gene as something that is actually present in large portions of the population, but it just needs to be activated somehow.

Flash forward to the snap. As Rocket said, the entire planet was awash with strange energies that nobody had ever seen before. We know that infinity stone energy gave powers to Carol danvers, Wanda and Pietro maximoff and Monica Rambeau.

The Xavier and Magneto of this time line are pre-snap mutants. Also, Wolverine, but I'll get to him in a bit. Xavier and Magneto managed to find each other and strike up a friendship with many theoretical discussions about an expanding mutant population. Now that that's actually happening, the discussions turn into arguments and we all know where the arguments will lead...

That said, I would want the MCU X-Men movies to be about the students, rather than the Xavier Magneto conflict because that's all that FOX focused on. For that matter, I wouldn't even include Wolverine in the X-Men... At first.

I would have two concurrent movie trilogies, one focused on the X-Men, and one focused on Wolverine through the years. The third X-Men movie in the trilogy would end with Wolverine joining the X-Men.

Anyway, that's what I would do.

 

Yeah, having mutants be a globally new phenomenon with small numbers of historical mutants who remained hidden is simple, easy and fits perfectly with the MCU. (It also, incidentally, is exactly how mutants were portrayed in the comics.)

This whole idea of Xavier mind-wiping everyone constantly may not be entirely out of character *for him*, but I don't want to see literally all the X-Men introduced as being complicit in the decades long mind wiping of the entire world. And it falls apart even more when you consider the fact that all the evil mutants would not cease to exist or be content with a normal life just because Xavier keeps people from learning about mutants, so everyone involved would also be complicit in making the entire world far more vulnerable to people like Magneto, Mystique, Sabretooth, Blob, etc.

And the idea that they used to be public before Xavier made everyone forget is even worse, because now if you want to show flashbacks to famous MCU moments you're suddenly obligated to try to edit in a bunch of random mutants who weren't there in the original films which is never going to sit right, imo.

 

IIRC the old explanation for differentiating mutants is that the potential has always been there, and certain individuals that got their powers by "accident" (Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Reed Richards etc) did so because they had latent mutant genes that were activated (mostly by radiation, in those cases) where those without said latent genes would have simply died.
Whereas the X-Men were mutants of the not so latent variety. Things got added to, retconned, and made way more convoluted over the decades, but that was the basic idea . . . mostly because having to come up with a unique origin story for each and every character to explain their powers was way too cumbersome, so "they're all just mutants" was a neat way to handwave it.

As for how it all fits into the MCU; I tend to agree that having mutants be a tiny fraction of the population all this time is the way to go. You get to keep some of the historical mutants and not have to explain where they've been all this time because they were mostly just normal people living their lives. If any manifested their powers in a way that drew attention in the last 70 odd years then inevitably SHIELD/Hydra would show up, and that's the last anyone would see of them. Some may been known (like say, Logan) but it wouldn't be until much more recently that any commonality was discovered between them, probably when Xavier discovered the x-gene.

I do wonder though if it might be a good idea to introduce the Morlocks first? A population of outcasts who couldn't pass for human suddenly coming out of hiding (some perhaps escapees from SHIELD/Hydra labs), demanding equal treatment. That seems like a better way to introduce the social message without having it start with a private militia made up of indoctrinated students of a private school, flying around in an unlicensed super-jet. (Let's be honest, from the outside, the X-Men looks an awful lot like an extremist cult.)

Combine that with Earth being ground zero for several cosmic events over the last few years--not one but TWO infinity gauntlet snaps, the stillbirth of a celestial, and the repeated fracturing of the multiversal barrier--suddenly and spontaneously activating WAY more latent x-genes than usual (maybe ALL of them!) Leading to the post snap generation containing mutants as a non-trivial percentage of the population for the first time ever.

You could also include the Inhumans too, as they're basically an offshoot of mutants that the ancient Kree tried to weaponize, with disastrous results. Maybe link in the Eternals end of things by having the origin of the x-gene be some kind of confluence of early humans and Celestial science? Maybe the first run at replacing the Deviants before the Eternals were created resulted in Apocalypse?