With fans still waiting on Black Widow to officially kick off Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s plenty of people suffering withdrawal symptoms during the longest gap between MCU movies in a decade. And following The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s recent delay, news on future plans for the world’s biggest franchise has become increasingly hard to come by.
Phase Four is set to offer an exciting mix of new faces, returning favorites and a small screen expansion onto Disney Plus, and that’s without mentioning the continued speculation that Marvel will start planting the seeds for the eventual introductions of the X-Men and Fantastic Four. Both teams have been rumored to show up almost everywhere and now a new theory claims that Black Panther 2 could end up killing two birds with one stone and bringing both into the mix at once.
According to the theory, Storm could play a major role in T’Challa’s hotly-anticipated sequel given that the two characters have a long history in the comic books and even ended up getting married at one point, making Ororo Munroe the ideal candidate to be introduced as the King of Wakanda’s newest love interest, which could then be used as a jumping-off point to explaining how mutants fit into the MCU.
And although Namor is widely expected to be the villain of Black Panther 2, the latest theory indicates that there could also be room for Doctor Doom, with the latter’s reputation as the megalomaniacal dictator of Latveria meaning it would make total sense from both a story and character perspective if he showed up with his sights set on pillaging Wakanda’s vast natural resources.
This might present a relatively straightforward method of beginning the slow rollout for both the X-Men and Fantastic Four into the MCU, but it could also see Black Panther 2 fall into the same traps as Iron Man 2 by focusing too heavily on building the world around it at the expense of the story being told. Still, that being said, Marvel are in no rush to debut either of their newly-acquired properties and Kevin Feige no doubt already knows exactly how he’s going to do it anyway.
