Marvel covers quite the array of universes and throughout the decades the comics have been going, heroes have crossed over into one another’s realms, with Hulk and Wolverine hammering it out and Spider-Man making the odd appearance amongst the mutants as well; but can we ever expect to see this within the MCU?
Disney bought out 20th Century Fox for a staggering $71.3 billion in 2019, allowing many superheroes previously unavailable to Marvel in the cinematic space to finally come home, so to speak. Now, there is the possibility for the current MCU to collide with the X-Men, but just how tricky will it be to navigate, and is it worth the risk? Fans took to Reddit to debate that very question.
The X-Men have been one of Marvel’s most popular creations, and they got their own movies back in the early 2000s, quite a bit before Robert Downey Jr. brought Iron Man to life on the big screen. They had their original trilogy, multiple Wolverine movies — some phenomenal (Logan), some less so (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) — and a reboot of the franchise through X-Men: First Class. Since the release of Iron Man in 2008, the two universes have been running alongside one another at the cinemas but never interacted. That is until we heard the voice of a certain Patrick Stewart in the trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Fans wonder just how the rest of the mutants will be introduced to the MCU, will they start from scratch or will they simply pull in the existing characters and their actors as well.
Some want to see a gradual introduction to the X-Men, hoping to eek it out over the next phases for Marvel.
Many posted that they want to see the X-Men and the Avengers’ universes separate still, as integrating them would be tricky and would be hard to satisfy all die-hard fans.
This Reddit user feels strongly about retaining what the mutants stand for as symbols of real-world minorities struggling against bigotry, so phasing them in in a way that allows them to still tell these stories would be important. They even gave their own ideas for just how that could happen.
Many think that with Disney now owning the X-Men, we may see some more Marvel series with these characters in them, just as we have had MCU shows such as WandaVision and Loki.
This user gives a pretty straightforward way of tackling the problem, simply doing a reverse of what has already happened in the comics.
Whatever happens, it is up to the powers that be at Marvel, and we’re sure they have some ideas up their sleeves for how exactly they are going to go about bringing the X-Men into the Marvel Studios fold. We may find out very soon in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness if there is going to be a crossover and whether it will lay out the groundwork for the future of MCU.