Well, Folks, Avengers: Endgame (2019) is out at long last. The Infinity War storyline that began around this time last year has finally ended. Marvel’s Phase 3 of movies has finally ended. And, in a lot of ways, the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we have come to know and love it — 20-odd movies, dozens of characters and multiple inter-woven storylines — has come to an end. The culmination of more than a decade’s worth of movies and interconnected franchises has now concluded.
Obviously, not everybody has had the opportunity to see the movie yet. In some areas, secondhand tickets have been selling for upwards of $2000 (although I haven’t the foggiest idea what kind of person would even begin to pay that much money for a movie ticket you could get for $10 by waiting a week for more screenings to open up). Theaters are going to be packed for weeks as people try to make their way in to see it. AMCs in some areas are staying open for 24 hours at a stretch to ensure that they can keep up with demand. Even in my neck of the woods, they’re starting their last screenings of the night at 2 AM.
But still, the show much go on. There’s quite a lot to discuss regarding this movie, and that discussion had best start sooner, rather than later. So let this be your SPOILER WARNING: from here on out, I’m going to assume that you’ve either seen the movie already or you’re fine with finding out what’s been going on with it.
So have I sufficiently cleared the room with my front-and-center SPOILER WARNING, then? Are only the true believers left? Okay, then. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
The aftermath of Endgame leaves us with a lot of questions about how the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to operate going forward. Tony Stark is dead. Vision is dead. Black Widow is, you guessed it, dead. A dramatically aged Steve Rogers has well and truly passed the age of retirement. Sam Wilson has now taken on the mantle of Captain America. Hulk’s finally found the razor’s edge balance between being a big green rage monster and a hyper-intelligent man of science. Valkyrie’s now Queen of Asgard. Thor’s off jetting around with the Guardians of the Galaxy, which honestly just feels like such a better fit for him.
And to top everything off, with Disney’s acquisition of Fox, the MCU now has to figure out where and when they’ll insert their newly acquired Marvel properties: the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Honestly, despite the quick turnaround, I’m pretty surprised that we didn’t get a Fantastic Four post-credit scene that established the team in the post-Infinity Stone MCU. It’s probably to do with the fact that they haven’t yet (publicly) settled on a movie for the characters yet and certainly haven’t cast anybody in the roles yet. But the X-Men… the X-Men might be an easier insert into the present setting.
It’s not as if we haven’t seen any X-characters in the MCU. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, although tied to the Avengers branding through some fluke of publication rights, are, at least in print, the mutant children of Magneto. But due to the weird legal limbo they occupied in terms of the movies, Marvel was unable to make any reference to the characters’ parentage, the teams that they’ve historically been on or against (other than the Avengers, of course) nor to the fact that they are, in fact, Mutants: genetic offshoots of the Human race whose powers are innate to their physiology.
The solution, of course, was that they gave the characters reimagined backstories as Eastern-European orphans of war who were experimented on by Hydra using Loki’s Scepter from the first Avengers (2012), which contained the Mind Stone. Technically mutates (rather than mutants) according to the comic book definition of the words, they, like Vision or Captain Marvel, acquired their powers through exposure to the stones. And between the two snaps — the first being the one that killed off half the population, the second being the one that brought everybody back after five years — the Stones just interacted directly with a whole Hell of a bunch more people.
The problem with inserting the X-Men and their mutant brethren into the MCU has uniquely been because of what these characters were all about in the comics. There, they were flukes of genetics that began surfacing mostly in the 60s and afterwards (although there were plenty of earlier mutants throughout history, they were much fewer and further between). People grew to hate and fear them, and so began discriminating against them with reckless abandon.
So how would Marvel all of a sudden bring them all in? Would you just assume that they had been there the whole time? Why didn’t they ever come up in the preceding decade and a half within the universe of the films? If not, then are they a new development? Where were these characters this whole time?
Tapping into what has already been established about the mutagenic abilities of the Infinity Stones, however, it’s not hard to see how this can all be arranged so as to avoid any of those messy questions of “why is this the first time we’ve been hearing about these people if they’ve been there in secret this whole time?” The stones zap everybody away, then sometime later bring them all back. Some percentage of them — similar to Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and Captain Marvel — gained fantastical powers in the exchange.
Maybe longtime friends (but ideologically opposed) Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr manifest the powers of telepathy and magnetism when they return from the abyss: empowering the former to track down and protect vulnerable (and recently empowered youths) and the latter to seek bitter retribution against the Nazis and their ideological successors for the crimes they committed to those different from them. Maybe somebody like Scott Summers uncontrollably starts shooting lasers out of their eyes, or somebody like Kurt Wagner transforms into a fiendish blue form. Maybe the Stones have the unintended effect of resurrecting an old Canuck from the 1800s, scrambling his brain and giving him “bone claws.”
It’s easy to see how this sort of scenario can play out, with the sudden influx of superpowered beings causing the normal humans around them to by and large turn against them. After all, these aren’t Avengers. These aren’t trained professionals. These are scared children, vengeful adults and everything inbetwen. Many of them don’t have peoples’ best interests at heart, and all of a sudden they are everywhere.
For one, I’m excited to see where these possibilities take us in the MCU. Disney now has a massive cast of great characters to play with, and a prime opportunity to start inserting them into their franchises. The possibilities here are endless, so let’s hope that they can pull it off with the same aplomb that they’ve done with all of their movies in the MCU thus far.