Ok, let's talk about the implications of the reveal in the most recent Wandavision. This is going to be major spoiler territory, so if you aren't caught up on the show, I'd caution you to sit this post out until you are unless you really don't care about spoilers.
I was never a big comic book fan as a kid - I read the paperback Tintin books, and I think the only superheroes I was ever really into were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I didn't even really think of in the same context. I only really started reading non-Tintin comics when I was in college and read through Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and, of course, Watchmen.
When I was in my last year of summer camp the summer before I headed off to high school, we were taken to the movie theater at the nearby mall, as would happen maybe twice a month. The only remotely interesting option for me was X-Men, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would.
Superhero movies had certainly been a thing for a while - the late 70s saw Superman movies, and the late 80s had Tim Burton's two Batman movies which then gave way to Joel Schumacher's twin follow-ups (that were much less well-regarded.) I think what made X-Men good is that it took the premise seriously while still having fun with it.
The X-Men films have more or less existed in their own cinematic universe for twelve films over the last 21 years, though the continuity is quite vague: the first three movies were a basic trilogy with the same people playing the same characters, and like a lot of trilogies, the third entry was a major disappointment. Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was a popular character (as he is in the comics) and so scored his own trilogy, though the first two in that sub-series were also understood to be garbage, while the last was critically acclaimed (though its bleak future is of questionable canonicity).
After the third movie, they did a soft reboot of the series with X-Men First Class, theoretically a prequel, though one that changed certain relationships (for example, Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique was a far more central figure, and had a deep backstory with Charles Xavier.) This re-energized the franchise and led to another well-received movie: Days of Future Past, which involved time-travel and a cross-over between the cast of the pre-reboot series and the First Class folks.
It was in this movie that Peter Maximoff, aka Quicksilver, was introduced for a minor role, though one with a memorable sequence involving his super-speed allowing the audience to see a potentially bloody confrontation defused thanks to Quicksilver's super-speed.
Now, this was well after Marvel Studios had launched, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe had begun to take form. In fact, the MCU's version of Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff, had appeared in the post-credits scene after Captain America: The Winter Soldier, along with his sister Wanda, who in the MCU were not mutants, but people who had been altered using Loki's scepter, which we later learned contained the Mind Stone.
The X-Men are one of Marvel Comics' most beloved comic series, but before Marvel got into the movie game, they sold the rights to 20th Century Fox, who, among other things, made their own film series. (Similarly, they had sold the rights to Spider-Man, arguably Marvel's most popular superhero, to Sony.)
In a bizarre way, the two film companies each took one of the kids like a messy divorce. The MCU Quicksilver was killed off in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the movie in which he had first been properly introduced, while his sister, Wanda (aka The Scarlet Witch,) would go on to be a more important recurring figure in the MCU. The X-Men movies, on the other hand, didn't do anything with Wanda Maximoff (I'm not sure if she even appears in any of the X-Men movies).
The year previous, Fox had made their Quicksilver a breakout star, so I wonder if his death in the MCU was in part to avoid having two Quicksilvers competing at the box office. (Naturally, Joss Whedon's character-killing bloodlust was probably also part of it.)
Now, cut to a few years later: Disney has been on an acquiring spree, and in a rather shocking move, they purchase 20th Century Fox. News Corporation, which had previously owned it, is now just a bunch of far-right news media properties, while the extensive catalogue of 20th Century Fox, which dates back to 1935 (itself the product of a merger) is under the ever-widening Disney umbrella, which includes Marvel, Lucasfilm, etc.
Thus, the film rights to X-Men, which are owned by 20th Century Fox, are now owned by Disney. Who also own Marvel Studios (well, and all of Marvel Comics). Which means that the rights to the X-Men are now owned by the same people who own the MCU.
As a tangent:
Sony still owns the film rights to Spider-Man. However, after the failures of the Amazing Spider-Man movies, themselves a reboot from Sam Raimi's trilogy that A: helped kick off the 21st Century superhero movie boom and B: like the X-Men, really shat the bed on its third entry, Sony agreed to a deal with Disney where they could co-produce Spider-Man movies. Disney could get the massively popular superhero into the MCU while Sony got to enjoy a portion of the buy-in that audiences have with the MCU, while still making Spider-Man related movies like Into the Spider-Verse and Venom.
Why, then, did Disney and Fox not strike a similar deal early on?
I don't know what kind of hardball negotiating tactics each side was using, but I'd also note that Sony might not have minded rebooting Spider-Man again after the Andrew Garfield iteration met less audience enthusiasm. Fox, on the other hand, has a bit more buy-in with audiences.
Which brings us to today, when Disney now owns X-Men, and it seems like it's only a matter of time before they find a way to work the massively-popular X-Men into the overall MCU.
And in the most recent Wandavision, it seems possible that they've just done that.
If you haven't watched Wandavision, well, first, do so. But if you just want the basic run-down, here it is:
Wandavision is the weirdest thing they've done in the MCU. For the first couple episodes, it's presented entirely as a pastiche of sitcoms through the decades, starting with the 1950s and progressing a decade at a time. The stars, confusingly, are Wanda Maximoff and Vision, the synthetic humanoid created in Age of Ultron who was killed in the events of Avengers: Infinity War. The two of them were a couple before his death, when the supervillain Thanos pried the Mind Stone from his forehead to allow himself to snap half of the living people in the universe out of existence. While the events of Avengers: Endgame saw the "snap" reversed (or the "blip," as it's known in-universe,) and thus allowed those people (including Wanda) to return to life 5 years later, Vision's death was not part of that snap, happening moments before it, and thus his life was not restored.
And yet, while Wanda was able to join the battle against (it's complicated) a past version of Thanos and defeat him for good, the next time we see her, she's in some 1950s sitcom about how she and Vision are a charming married couple that are trying to hide the fact that he's a robot and she's magic from their ordinary community.
Over the first few episodes, the veneer of this sitcom reality occasionally breaks, but the explanation of why it's happening is still unknown. We've started to see things outside the sitcom town, where an agency called SWORD is trying to figure out what is causing this phenomenon and how to get the people trapped within it out. (The show suggests that Wanda is the cause of it - perhaps using this fake, cheerful reality to escape her grief, though there are also suggestions that some other sinister force is merely making it seem like she's in control.)
The most recent episode models itself on the sitcoms of the 1980s, playing with the various tricks those shows employed, with a strong focus on teaching lessons to kids (oh, she and Vision somehow have kids who have aged from infants to 10 years old in about 24 hours.)
Earlier in the episode, while she talks with her twin boys, Tommy and Billy, they ask if she has a brother, and she sort of euphemistically says that he's "very far away." As Vision has started to question this reality, confronting Wanda about her role in keeping him trapped there with no memories that pre-date their being there, the doorbell rings. Wanda claims that she is not doing that, and when she goes to answer the door, we can see who it is from the back of his head - Pietro's signature white-grey hair.
Momentarily, it seems that this reality has allowed her to bring her brother back from the dead, just as it allowed her to do so with Vision.
But then, we get the reverse shot, and rather than Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who played him in Age of Ultron, instead we see Evan Peters, who has played Quicksilver in the X-Men movies.
And this raises a lot of questions.
On one hand, I can't imagine they're going to import the entire X-Men movie franchise's continuity into the MCU. For one, it's self-contradictory: they've done (and flubbed) the Dark Phoenix saga twice, and Mystique dies before she appears in the original movie. And Logan seems too dark to allow for the ever-forward-looking MCU.
And yet, I have to imagine that Disney wants the X-Men - a whole group of really popular superheroes who also play to Marvel's strengths by serving as metaphors for various social issues, most notably prejudice.
There are a few interpretations:
One is that this is some fake-out. That Evan Peters' casting in this role is "coincidental," and that it's more of a casting gag than anything. Indeed, we might discover that this isn't actually her brother, but is some villain in disguise (people seem to think Mephisto, Marvel's basic "the devil" equivalent, could be behind it.)
I can't rule this possibility out entirely, but I think this would be kind of a big middle-finger to the audience. It's a major misstep if that's what it is, because it's a bait-and-switch not built into the narrative itself, but into the meta-narrative of the overlapping rights and film franchises. (In contrast with, say, Ben Kingsley not really being the Mandarin, being a bit of in-universe misdirection).
The alternative, though, is that this is the Quicksilver from the X-Men movies. But if that's the case, how could he exist when the Aaron Taylor-Johnson version did? "Peter" Maximoff appears to be an American who was a young man in the 1980s (EDIT: actually, it's the early 1970s, which makes this not fit the 1980s sitcom setting quite as well - though the First Class-era movies play fast and loose with time period and how much people ought to be aging between them, given that the first one's set in the early 60s), while "Pietro" Maximoff was a young man in the fictional Slavic country (city-state?) of Sokovia in the 2010s. It would seem that the MCU, to bring this Quicksilver into its continuity, might need to embrace the concept of a Multiverse - suggesting that the Fox-run X-Men movies took place in their own universe (maybe a couple, given the inconsistencies between their original run and the soft reboot) while the MCU, as the name implies, is its own.
Indeed, this would even allow for the Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland Peter Parkers to co-exist. (The next Spider-Man movie is rumored to have Maguire and Garfield appearing, along with Alfred Molina's Doc Ock, which could imply a live-action "Into the Spider-Verse" like story).
And hey, we know that Wanda's going to be a part of the second Doctor Strange movie, whose full title is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so... that seems possible.
Now, there is an air of corporate bullshit to this. But if anyone is good at spinning corporate bullshit into genuinely quality entertainment, it's Disney.
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