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Uncle Jesse broke the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Or at least a loving pastiche of Full house The heartthrob did what many fans expected Professor X and Magneto to accomplish.
Some days before WandaVisionWhen the fifth episode aired, Disney’s marketing apparatus went into action. Series leader Elizabeth Olsen promised fans a Luke Skywalker-level twist that appeared in Season 2 of The Mandalorian. From then on, publications began to circulate a Olsen clip discussing the 2005 comic book House of M—An eight-edition miniseries that strongly depicts the X-Men. Everything looked like a calculated blitzkrieg designed to prepare viewers for the kind of big splash that had escaped WandaVision in its first four episodes.
For weeks, WandaVision with love (and precision) humor series from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but when it came time to dig a series from the 1980s to 1990s, as Full house, no character on the Marvel show represented a type of Uncle Jesse. That’s until a knock comes on Wanda’s door 30 minutes after this week’s episode. “Wanda, who is this?” Vision asks as a stunned Wanda stares at white-haired Evan Peters, wearing a leather jacket appropriate for the time. “Did she reformulate Pietro?” the show’s replacement, Darcy, asks in surprise.
Depending on your level of fandom and patience, you either get confused by this turnaround or froth at the mouth. Wanda’s brother Pietro Maximoff, also known as Mercury, was last seen dying in 2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron, had returned from the dead. But instead of Aaron Taylor-Johnson playing the role, he was replaced by Peters. And even record why This one mattered, you should be aware that Peters was cast as Pietro in three X-Men films released by 20th Century Fox before Disney acquired it. The X-Men moment for the MCU came well ahead of schedule if WandaVison’s the last-minute twist is true.
“It will take a while,” said Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige IO9 in 2019 about any of the mutants that appear in the MCU. “It’s all just started, and the five-year plan we’ve been working on, we were working on before anything was defined. So it really is a lot more, for us, less about details of when and where now and more just the comfort factor ”of the X-Men being“ back home ”under Marvel again. “But it will take too long.”
According to Jac Schaeffer, WandaVision Principal writer, Feige needed to be convinced to implement the surprise. “We love the idea of [bringing Pietro back]. And then we thought, how in the world are we going to make this make logical sense? Like, how can we justify that? ”Schaeffer said in an interview with Marvel. “I think Kevin [Feige] I wanted to make sure there was a reason for that, which made sense. ”
Peters’ Quicksilver debut at the end of WandaVision potentially increases that timeline. Earlier this year, Feige shared that Ryan Reynolds Dead Pool the franchise would also enter the MCU with its R rating intact. So far, the future of the X-Men looks like the past. If you were a popular enough mutant in the Fox universe, you could probably appear at any time in the MCU.
To fully appreciate the mutants that inhabit the same world as Thor and Spider-Man, not only do you need to know Marvel’s story in 23 films, but you also need to have some knowledge of the 13 X-Men films that started in 2000. If the rumors are true, the third Tom Holland Spider man will feature former Peter Parkers Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, but it may also be necessary to consume five more films.
More than a decade of fandom, world building and consolidation has created a maze of content in which a new fan would take months – maybe even years – to navigate. The MCU machine has spent most of its existence transforming big budget films into television, and now with the launch of its first Disney + program, the house that Feige built is trying to reverse engineer the cinema show to the ends of TV . With the potential arrival of the X-Men at the MCU, it is difficult to say whether the interconnected nature of the giant of more than 20 films is its greatest strength or a dam about to break.
As well as WandaVision it is a love ode to sitcoms of yesteryear, it is also a program about other programs, a collection of possibilities fueled by the fandom disguised as progression of the plot. In many ways, this has been the MCU’s promise since Nick Fury wanted to speak to Tony Stark about “the Avenger initiative” after the credits rolled in 2008 Iron Man. With each successive Marvel film, Easter codas and eggs have created a craft industry of content and fandom. Predicting what was coming next was more important than what you just watched. It was a new approach for an overwhelmed movie studio selling a vision for a future franchise that no one had seen before. But within the limits of a weekly TV show, the constant nods and winks for some segment of the plot that will be developed in another film or MCU show are beginning to look commercial.
Every week in WandaVision a new character revelation or plot twist now has implications for building a franchise. Does Peters’s appearance in Pietro signal an X-Men franchise? Are the Wanda and Vision twins destined to be Young Avengers? You can call for a “Fun X Files“– what does that mean – starring Jimmy Woo has become one thing? It didn’t matter that episode 5 of WandaVision was among the best of the season, because he finally tested how far Wanda would go to protect his simulated life. The emotional climax between the confused Olsen and the furious Paul Bettany was out of the question the moment the meta-disclosure opened the door.
Comic book films are now fully entrenched in the age of the multiverse – a structure created out of necessity to manage the various stories told by a variety of disparate writers and artists. It’s a concept that ensures that everything matters (for example, a dear Pietro Maximoff in Evan Peters existing in two different franchises) and makes sense if you just squint hard enough.
The multiverse was popularized in 1961 The Flash do not. 123, which revealed that modern Barry Allen Flash and World War II original Jay Garrick Flash lived in two separate worlds. In the 1980s, Marvel shared that its comic book world was one Earth among many, specifically Earth-616, in a comic book series by Captain Britain of David Thorpe.
“The wonderful and incredible thing about Marvel Comics is the fact that, over the generations, it’s essentially like a great novel written by a lot of different people – probably hundreds and hundreds of different writers and many other artists. And they all need to be internally consistent. And if they aren’t, you tend to get someone to write somewhere and point it out to you, ”explained Thorpe last year. “This idea of consistency can be a little limiting. As Marvel grew, and it was kind of billions and billions of pages of ink spilled, things are likely to happen that were not originally planned. ”
It is natural that comics films take this idea and use it to reconcile the various actors, characters and franchises that are being built for the screen and streaming services. 2018 Spider-Man: In the Spider-Verse introduced to the public a black and Puerto Rican Spiderman, a talking pig Spiderman and a noir Spiderman, all existing in different universes. Last year, DC revealed that it is launching a multiverse to straighten out the reality that several Batmen and Jokers will soon be circulating simultaneously. Doctor Strange’s next film has a slightly subtle title Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness after the concept was provoked by the Elder at the beginning of 2016. The Multiverse of Madness it also happens with Elizabeth Olsen reprising her role as Wanda Maximoff.
But one of the main reasons why the physical comics market continues to falter, while comic book films flourish, is what the multiverse inevitably produced. If you go to any comic book store in the United States and ask to buy a Vision and Scarlet Witch comic, you will inevitably receive hundreds of different responses. Do you want a story from the 616 universe, the Ultimate universe, a 1980s miniseries or something newer? Depending on who is running what, Wanda may be a mutant, daughter of Magneto or none of the above. The vision may be alive, dead, an adolescent Iron Man or the father of a bunch of robot children he built.
For better or worse, the MCU looks more like its parent material than ever. If movies can succeed where comics continue to fail, it will be the biggest challenge of all. Managing the Marvel cinematic universe is one thing. Following Marvel’s cinematic multiverse will be something entirely different.