With the Disney-Fox buyout said to be finalized soon, superhero fans are preparing for Marvel Studios to fold the X-Men universe into the ever-growing Marvel Cinematic Universe. We know that president Kevin Feige will be given control of the mutants shortly, but we haven’t actually got 100% confirmation that the two universes will be merged into one. It’s obviously what most of us want to see though, but one person who doesn’t think it’d be a good idea is Professor X himself, James McAvoy.
While speaking with Yahoo! to promote Glass, the topic of the possible merger was inevitably brought up, and McAvoy came clean about his feelings that dropping the X-Men into the MCU just wouldn’t work due to the differing way that they and the Avengers are perceived by the public in their own universes.
“I don’t know if the X-Men could go into the Marvel universe, I’m not sure. Maybe they could? But I think what’s different about the Avengers universe anyway is you’ve only got a couple of superheroes in the world. There’s a good amount, but there’s like a couple of football teams’ worth, you know what I mean? Whereas in the X-Men world you’re potentially saying there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of [superheroes] and the social implication of that is different.”
Of course, the likely rebuff that Marvel fans will say in response to McAvoy’s comments is that the X-Men and the Avengers have coexisted in the same universe in the comics for the past 50-something years. To be fair to the actor, though, he does touch on the big problem that hangs over the idea of introducing the mutants into the MCU more than 10 years in: why have we never heard of this huge part of the population before now?
That’s likely why fans have taken to theorizing about ways that the reality of the MCU could be altered following Avengers: Endgame to allow for a change as massive as the arrival of mutants to be factored into the franchise. Maybe the Infinity Gauntlet being used to halve the universe, or perhaps whatever method the heroes have of reversing Thanos’ catastrophic actions, is what causes reality to be rewritten and mutantkind to emerge?
Time will tell, but what do you think? Is McAvoy onto something here, or are the X-Men destined to become part of the MCU? Join the conversation in the comments section down below.
