Sunday, January 6, 2019

Will the MCU Ever Address Wanda's True (Mutant) Heritage?




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Quicksilver (Pietro Maximoff and the Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff)








With Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the barriers for introducing the studio's Marvel properties, including mutants such as the X-Men and Deadpool, have been removed. How those properties are introduced is the question (when that happens is a pretty good question too). A couple of mutants have actually showed up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe already -- they just weren't called mutants.

The Winter Soldier's mid-credits scene features the first MCU appearance of "The Twins". These twins, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, are shown exhibiting unnatural abilities -- Pietro can move at lightning speed and Wanda has some sort of telekinesis. It's suggested and later explained more fully in The Age of Ultron that the siblings' superhuman abilities are the result of experiments conducted on them by HYDRA-member Baron von Strucker using Loki's scepter.

Though their codenames are never used in the movies, comics fans know this brother-and-sister team as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, respectively. Their real names, powers (more or less, in Wanda's case) and even hair and costume color remain unchanged from the source material. What has changed is their parentage and the source of their powers. You see, these two are none other than part-time supervillain Magneto's kids. And like their father, their abilities stem from the mutant gene that they possess. Incidentally, their sister, Polaris, inherited their dad's ability to manipulate magnetism -- but the MCU has yet to acknowledged her presence either.

But when Marvel sold the rights to the X-Men to Fox just about everything mutant-related went along. The concept of mutantcy itself was a part of the deal. Fox has included Magneto in several of their X-Men movies. The studio even featured their own (inferior) version of Quiksilver, with white hair and lightning speed, in Days of Future Past. But apparently, Disney found a loophole in the deal or renogotiated in order to bring the Maximoff's into the MCU fold -- without their mutantcy and previously established lineage.

However, as mentioned earlier, Disney's purchase of Fox makes any such loophole unnecessary. Going forward, the filmmakers could legally reset the twins' origin to its default setting -- and possibly without much of a shake-up. After all, Pietro was killed and nobody even seems to remember him. But then again, the title character of The Age of Ultron's origin was altered so that he was created by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner instead of his comics inventor, Henry Pym aka Ant-Man. And no licensing complications barred Pym's  involvement -- his own movie, Ant-Man, premiered just two months after Ultron's release. So who knows what the folks at Marvel Studios are gonna do? Or why they do it?






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Quicksilver, Magneto and the Scarlet Witch

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