The MCU's X-Men

Ms Marvel and Namor are MCU mutants. Professor Xavier had a cameo in the last Dr Strange film, in a scene that said: all Marvel superhero films belong in the MCU now; there's a place for them, even Man-Thing and the Punishers. The cat is out of the bag. Homo Superior walks among us. In one version of the multiverse or another.

Except, if you care to look at the proposed schedule for the next four years, there is no sign of Marvel's mega-successful mutants anywhere on that list... Unless you include Deadpool 3 which could be anything but we know that Huge Ackman's Wolverine is going to be in it. Presumably so is Colossus and Teenage Negasonic wassname girl. Or it could just be Wolverine and by the nature of the Deadpool films, we'll be no closer to understanding what significance the letter X will have in the MCU. Unless they do a brave move and introduce the X-Men and their universe to the MCU through this film.

The X-Men and all of the spin-offs are conspicuous by their absence on the forthcoming MCU lists. There's not likely to be an X-Men film or TV show until 2027 at the earliest and that might only be a BIG announcement to reignite interest in the entire franchise if Phase 5 continues to be critically panned and starts suffering from less profit. The X-Men could be the magic bullet Marvel needs. At least that's the conclusion I came to because if Disney was planning a major mutant event before 2027 we would have heard about it already.

Once upon a time I was the best person in the world to speculate about the X-Men. I even got interviewed by national magazines about my rather sad fanboy fascination with them. It was purely by accident, but it didn't do me any harm and I made some good friends out of it and got to know some famous people along the way. However, my X-Men knowledge ends in 2001 and even then it was as sketchy as fuck from about 1996 onwards. I might have created a hugely successful X fanzine, presented X-Men panels at comic conventions and been used as the litmus test for future X-Men writers, but at some point in the early 1990s I realised the reasons I was a huge fan were never going to be addressed. The questions I had and the things that dragged me into the franchise's embrace were never going to be answered. I did though know everything you needed to know about anything X from the first issue of X-Men to the issues of Ms Marvel (first incarnation) or Iron Fist or Marvel Team-Up that seemingly had nothing to do with the X legend but were fundamental to specific story lines.

The obsession I had with the X franchise was really more to do with Chris Claremont, the writer and overseer for all things mutant. I followed him rather than the mutants, because he weaved fantastic stories using techniques that would be applauded even now - including placing important 'Easter eggs' in comics that were being cancelled or creating a soap opera feel that was absent from all other comics - the X-Men weren't just a team of disparate heroes, they were people, they were a family. And so were the villains they battled. 

The comics might have been excellent, but that was because of the creator; the X-Men would never have been the best selling comic in the world for so long if it had been written by an illiterate drunken monkey. So when Claremont finally left, the nuclear story became linear and splintered even more and ten years after his departure the X-Men weren't even the most successful comic any longer, despite there being actual feature films with A list actors starring as mutants. The fact that Fox's X-Men was all about style over substance didn't help matters. 

The MCU is - paradoxically - the main problem faced by the MCU in bringing X to its universe. 

How are we - the punter - going to accept the integration of mutants into the MCU and have characters as old as Charles Xavier or Erik Lensherr existing in the world without ever being noticed? What about characters like Kurt Wagner - Nightcrawler, or Scott Summers - Cyclops? How are these people going to have become young adults without them having fallen on the radar of the numerous government and world organisations that the MCU now has?

Perhaps Wank Ada Forever dealt with that issue so it becomes easy from now on. Oh look, we have an entire race of underwater dwelling humanoids that have been there as long as man and we never noticed them before... Now we have the Atlanteans then perhaps we can suddenly have a bunch of super powered humans that no one ever noticed before. That's why mutants or X-Men have an immediate problem in the grand scheme of things. 

I still think the safest thing to do would be have a distinct 'mutant universe' introduced and then through some major battle or crossover unite the it with the MCU - if that's even what they want to do. One of the things that made the X-Men work as a comic was because it clearly took place in the same world as the other MCU characters and that meant that mutants and super powered others sometimes shared the same stories as well as cities, but managed to kind of keep each other at arms length - like church and state. They teamed up when necessary and argued when told.

There's also the big colourful elephant in the room. The X-Men and mutants was a fantastic platform to highlight what's wrong with racism; the cornerstone of the books was always - we're different from you but we're still saving your arses. In many ways the world has become so polarised that the X-Men are going to seem a bit woke, especially if you follow the template that Lee and Kirby put down for subsequent writers and artists to follow. The problem now is if it tried to embrace all of the marginalised groups it might lose itself in a mire of boxes to tick rather than be entertaining. Plus, the entertainment world is actually quite flooded with things about the disenfranchised trying to find their own voices and any attempt at doing the X-Men as they should be done is opening it to criticism even before the first word of a script is written.

Ironically, despite becoming such a phenomenal success during the 1990s, selling unprecedented amounts of comics, the X-Men were always a B list product and was the first Marvel comic of that iconic Silver Age era to be cancelled, only to be resurrected less than a decade later as the hip and trendy, social commentary comic that wasn't afraid to push the envelope. Some of the comics' greatest classic storylines focused on what it was like to want to be treated as an equal despite just saving the planet from another threat that no one else was around to deal with. But the best stories were when they were fighting for their own survival because of their being different. The Sentinels - in the comic - were one of the greatest villains ever created because you couldn't reason with them; they were programmed to do one thing and they did that thing at whatever the cost. They were emotionless automatons learning from their own mistakes and relentless in their pursuit of their goal. 

I've always felt that the X-Men were the first super/fantasy heroes. Mutants technically speaking could be a person with the ability to shit cupcakes or turn their own phlegm into slugs; whatever your genetic weirdness is that's your power. A lot of it wouldn't work visually on the big screen. The telepaths and telekinetic (a group of mutants that were anything but unique) will move things with their minds or read another's mind - that's not terribly exciting, is it? It's also not likely to become exciting visually any time soon. Watching two people straining at each other like some kind of surreal diarrhea stand off...

The problem is Magneto or Professor X would struggle to visually look good in the MCU; one touches his forehead and reads someone's mind, the other touches his forehead and some metal does what he wants it to; while the outcome of their actions might be visually stunning, they themselves are not.

Even if you went back to basics and started at the beginning you'd have Cyclops - possible cinematic impact, Jean Grey - little cinematic impact (a lot of gesticulation and deep concentration), Iceman - possible, Angel - likely to succeed but what a lousy power and Beast, a hairy boy who's quite strong and good at gymnastics: this doesn't really work on film or TV. Plus, in this new world of the MCU the first time the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants put its head above the parapet the latest version of the Avengers would be ramming their back doors with prejudice. 

A 21st Century X-Men by Marvel/Disney would need to be historically accurate but also different. It would need believable characters, great villains, prejudice, tension, fear and loathing - all the things Fox's X-Men films never found and all of these things would really need to be introduced slowly, to give the feeling that this is something mutants have had to suffer since birth. 

I think, honestly, they'd need to be reinvented for the MCU with maybe only some of the classic tales of the last 60 years used - but with a different cast; an All-New All-Different version... Reinvention has worked for it in the past.

We do know that Avengers: Secret Wars is going to happen in 2026 and some people know that the  original comics series introduced us to the Beyonder and the idea of all the heroes and villains battling each other. This might be the place to introduce the X-Men as a finished product, one which you could work backwards on whether it's part of a unified MCU or its own little corner. My guess is if they intend to really do it and introduce us to a mutant universe then this film will be what sets us up for The X-Men. The problem is it's also got to house as many of the other heroes and villains - known or unknown - as possible without needing to be 4 hours long.

The thing is, we're unlikely to see 'proper' mutants films before 2027 unless it happens on TV, so could they do the X-Men as a TV series then spin-off some feature films? 

That would be my best case scenario even if it issues the message about [lack of] faith in the product and even then how would you include it? How would it slot into the MCU? A place that's growing rapidly but without much happening. Imagine it like this; superhero movies biggest fans are comic book readers; comic book readers get their dose of comic once a month, in some cases they'll wait longer but usually they get five or six completed stories in a year from their favourite titles. That equates to four films and eight TV series every year and all will cost money and regardless of what the films make, can they make the same dosh from TV shows via subscription services? 

The only realistic way of introducing mutants and NOT weakening the existing franchise is to divide that franchise up into sections. Hope there's a degree of tribalism out there and that factions develop that they can exploit through social media and the multiverse suddenly becomes the normal thing and there are [plucks a figure from the air] 7 prime universes, one in which superheroes exist, one with magic and monsters, one with cosmic heroes, one with Spider-Man's supporting cast, one with mutants and a couple of others they keep secret until they need a new Big Bad. If one of them fails one of the others steps in and helps the most popular characters into a new wing of the entire franchise.

More importantly, they would need any mutant TV shows to be shit hot telly. It would need to be the Game of Thrones for superheroes and need at least two spin-offs from it to help fill in the gaps. It would need enough realism to keep it relevant and enough humour to keep it real. It would have to have good actors, a serious feel and political enough to satisfy both sides of the argument. It would need to have characters the general public would know even if they were in situations you might not expect them to be in. More importantly it would be groundwork because to be able to get to the position the X-Men were in when Chris Claremont turned them into superstars; you'd need a dozen years of character building and history.

Plus, if the above happens it doesn't avoid the major question - if you were superpowered why weren't you fighting against Thanos? It's pretty much what makes Eternals such a piece of crap (and did any of them disappear with the Snap?). Where were the fucking Atlanteans? Were they exempt from that half of all living things crap? If there was a mutant underground with people like Phoenix or Wolverine or Magneto or Apocalypse in it why did they ignore all that shizzle? If you're going to rewrite history you need plausible creativity and the snap gives you a fixed point in time that you can't really fuck about with too much because wankers like me can influence the success of a film by constantly reminding everyone of the logical errors in rubbish films. You might not think this matters too much, but the excuse given by the Eternals for not helping during the Thanos crisis really sat badly with even the most ambivalent of MCU fans, it would almost have been better had it never been mentioned.

Of course, a novel way of solving the problem would be by using Kang's ability to change time now there is a multiverse again. What if the true timeline had mutants in it all along but someone changed history back in the 1960s preventing the likes of Magneto and Xavier from being key figures and stopping the activisation of the X factor, preventing humans from evolving?

I think a sure fire way of guaranteeing the success of the Fantastic Four film would be to start it like it was the second or third part of a trilogy, then slowly reveal that their world isn't our world and maybe finish it with whatever threat they faced now heading the way of the Avengers. Make it clear the FF belong in a different version of our universe and also have some of the MCU's iconic figures also popping up in the FF film - to paint the picture that there are other, different, Tony Starks, Bruce Banners and Steve Rogers. Maybe the threat that Reed Richards discovers (because it's always going to be him) is a threat to all the multiverse. If during this film we were introduced to an extant X-Men team it could kill two birds with one stone and any subsequent mutant film could have flashbacks to fill in the blanks. 

Without adding to the problems, Marvel also has to shuffle into this their space films and the other areas, such as Blade, the next phase of Captain America/Iron Man and [dark] Avengers films and it's when you look at the big picture and at what Marvel appears to be shooting in the future there doesn't appear to be much scope to introduce another race of humans with magical powers that sound a bit like the Inhumans idea they tried to introduce but failed. I wonder if they simply haven't got anything and are not even going to think about it until at last 2025 when they have to start making shit up for the next few years. The more years that pass the further away we get from Fox's X-films and the more wiggle room the MCU has.

Obviously there's the fly in the soup with my argument; even if the mutants might not be a good idea in general, they have two very good ideas, that make money: Deadpool and Wolverine. The beauty of Chris Claremont's Logan was that no one else was allowed to play with the character without it getting his approval so the baggage was kept to a minimum and allowed Claremont to drop more clues about Logan's past that suggested it wasn't quite as ABC as the film portrayal suggested. If you had a new Wolverine that was as complex and anachronistically peculiar as the one from the comics of 1980s and 1990s then you might not need other regular mutants. 

The same applies to Deadpool who I expect will never be fully integrated onto the MCU. Wade will always be the village idiot's brother; the single written by the drummer, the character that sits just outside sanity - a clever way of showing Deadpool from a MCU perspective would be as a ranting psychopath prone to ultra violent outbursts unless his genitals are being fondled, which, thinking about it, isn't something you're likely to see on Disney+ in my lifetime. 

However, Wolverine and Deadpool could exist in the MCU without the latter ever having to do anything that interferes with the actual story and Logan could simply slide into something with little fanfare. The same could be said for some other mutants, but slowly introduce them across TV and films until you have enough to have your own TV show or film if it's worth it. We have two mutants in the MCU at the moment, if we only had five by this time next year I'd be happy. You need to create and foment anti-mutant hysteria over time, it's not something that'll crop up over night, especially given how superheroes have helped mankind and the Sokovia Accords already toyed with the concept. 

In conclusion, the best thing would be not to bring the X-Men into the MCU in any way shape or form.