When it comes to premature fan theories, not many fandoms have that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe beat. If you scroll through Reddit enough, we’d bet a dollar or two that someone has tried to look ahead to the MCU’s state in the year 2100, which will no doubt be spearheaded by the third or fourth Kevin Feige that Marvel Studios grow in test tubes in each of the writers’ rooms.
Ethically void science notwithstanding, Marvel fans love getting ahead of themselves, and one user on r/marvelstudios has even gone as far as to predict some of the nuances behind the MCU’s next saga. For context, we’re only a third of the way through the Multiverse Saga, which won’t be concluding until at least 2026.
More specifically, the user has questioned who will be following in the footsteps of Thanos and Kang as the third saga’s big bad. With the borderline inevitability that the next saga will feature mutants as the meat of its theme, it wasn’t long before the most agreeable answer popped up.
Indeed, anyone familiar with Marvel’s mutant-centric stories, particularly those of the X-Men, will know that the real big bad is almost certainly going to be oppression and discrimination from non-mutants.
As for who could be pulling the strings of such a heinous rhetoric, names like Reverend Stryker and Bolivar Trask began popping up.
As for a more traditional antagonist in the vein of Thanos and Kang, one user suggested Apocalypse, one of the world’s first mutants and a longtime nemesis of the X-Men.
But the possibility of discrimination filling the role of the big bad has the most interesting implications; the MCU could very well weaponize real and fictional superhero fatigue against its own champions.
It’s fun to think about what the future holds, to be sure, but we believe in gleaning joy from the present, which just happens to involve the start of Phase Five with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, set to release a month from now on Feb. 17. We’re all eager to see what kind of weight Jonathan Majors will bring to Kang, and suffice to say, the expectations are brushing the ceiling.
