Does anyone else feel they’re aging like Professor X — Charles Xavier went into the ’90s looking like James McAvoy and ended the decade as Patrick Stewart — while we wait to properly meet mutants in the MCU? Sure, we’ve already got Ms. Marvel, Namor, and a couple of others, and we’ve got some Fox cameos to come in Deadpool 3, but the existence of mutants on Earth-616 (or 99999) is still mostly a mystery. That’s why it’s so mind-blowing that Marvel has apparently been hyping them up as far back as 2015.
As one eagle-eyed Redditor discovered, what must be the very first allusion to mutant-kind existing in the MCU’s main reality came a full eight years in surely the franchise’s most obscure Easter egg — as it hails from an Avengers: Age of Ultron tie-in comic book prequel. These kinds of releases have often suffered a sketchy place in canon because they’re sometimes retconned as further screen projects come out, but in this case, the Ultron prequel comic predicted a future MCU revelation with astonishing accuracy.
The Easter egg in question sees a HYDRA scientist comment on the effectiveness of their experiments with the Mind Stone on the Maximoff twins, with the scientist excited to see what abilities the scepter will “unlock” in the siblings. This was a big deal for the time as Ultron itself merely indicated the Infinity Stone created Wanda and Pietro’s powers. In this way, the comic foreshadowed the twist in WandaVision, not released for another six years, that the twins already had powers. i.e. they were mutants.
Evidence like this is why most fans are assuming the 616 X-Men team will eventually be revealed as having existed in this universe all along, we’ve just never seen them before. While that may stretch credibility, there are clearly Easter eggs here and there that can fool us into believing Marvel always planned to fold the X-Men into their own experiments.
