Anna Daniels
Marvel fans keep waiting for the day when the X-Men will finally be introduced in the MCU, with most indications being that it will be a while yet before they come along. However, some fans feel that they may be there already, and we just don’t know it yet.
Even if that theory proves not to be correct, there’s another one floating around that Marvel’s Eternals will at the very least be the gateway to letting the Mutants walk in the door. It almost certainly won’t be via the seemingly cursed movie The New Mutants.
Mutants kicked off the superhero wave
Movie buffs have said that it was Fox’s X-Men franchise that set Hollywood on its “all superheroes all the time” mentality that still prevails. Yes, Superman kicked off the whole thing in 1978 and Tim Burton’s Batman popularized it in 1989, but it arguably wasn’t until X-Men in 2000 that superhero movies became a regular part of the movie diet rather than a sometimes treat.
Consider that even when Batman hit in 1989, it was mostly Batman films that were the big hits through the rest of the 90s. And even that franchise had stalled by 1997 with Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, which many fans considered an embarrassment.
When Fox took on X-Men it was considered a gamble. Per IMDB, The first X-Men movie was one of Kevin Feige’s early credits, where he was an associate producer.
So when X-Men was a hit, that opened the door to the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies for Sony, the Fantastic Four movies for Fox and the Batman revival at Warner Bros. with the then up-and-coming director Christopher Nolan turning in Batman Begins. Finally, the MCU was born in 2008, with Iron Man.
The mutants continued their reign up until last year with Dark Phoenix, which pleased relatively few people. That film’s failure seemed to defeat the X-Men in a way Magneto never could.
Have mutants been in the MCU all along?
One of the central conflicts of the X-Men movies is how much humans fear mutants because humans don’t necessarily know the mutants walk among them. A fan theory on Reddit suggests the mutants have been in the MCU the whole time. It all ties into a certain snap.
“A convenient way to introduce mutants into the MCU is for them to first establish that mutants with powers have always existed in some capacity, but their prevalence has significantly increased since the snap. The snap caused radiation (as mentioned in Endgame) that elicited a massive epigenetic response in the surviving population with mutant genes.”
Fans liked the idea, with one responding: “I think that’s a very nice theory. It fits very well into the already existing plot and opens opportunities to introduce old mutants (like Wolverine, Prof X, Magneto and Sinister ) and also new ones! I think it will take awhile before we see the X-men or mutants back on the big screen but I hope that for 2024-5 we can get some mutants in the MCU!”
Could ‘The Eternals’ be the gateway to the mutants?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_vJhUAOFpI?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]
A different fan theory suggests that a movie scheduled to come out next year will serve as the launch for mutants. According to the comics, the Eternals were a race of super-beings, and that makes them similar to the X-Men on the surface. But more than that, the Eternals were created by the Celestials, cosmic beings who were experimenting with human DNA.
This is all conjecture, but such stories dealing with microbiology could come into vogue in the wake of the pandemic. While scientists the world over are looking into microscopes to try to find a vaccine, a Marvel movie dealing with an invisible enemy might only be too timely in the years to come.
In the meantime, as EW reports, The Eternals is now scheduled to come out next February, with Marvel having shifted its slate due to the pandemic. At this time, there is still no new release date for the unlucky former Fox film The New Mutants, which was finally supposed to be in theaters the first weekend of April after more than two years of delays. That isn’t part of the MCU, but once again it’s back on the shelf looking for some way to be a new Disney movie with mutants.
Written by: Cheat
