Ever since Marvel Studios first acquired the rights to the X-Men when Disney completed the Fox takeover, there’s been no shortage of speculation as to how the world’s most popular franchise would reboot the mutants and absorb them into the canon of Kevin Feige’s cinematic universe.
It isn’t as straightforward as simply debuting an all-new roster, of course, especially when fans had grown fond of the core team over the course of thirteen movies and 20 years, which yielded over $6 billion at the box office and turned the likes of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto into three of the most popular and recognizable characters in the history of the superhero genre.
It looks as if WandaVision may have stumbled upon the answer, though, after Evan Peters made his shocking return as Fox’s Quicksilver in an MCU project. The multiverse is set to drive the narratives of at least Spider-Man 3 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness once the adventures in WestView draw to a close, but the precedent for intertwining realities is now fully established.
Wanda seemed as shocked as Disney Plus subscribers around the world that her brother had turned up, but not as the version she knew. The bridge between Fox’s X-Men and the MCU’s roster of heroes has now been established, though, and instead of simply rebooting the entire franchise from the ground up, Feige could both theoretically and realistically pick and choose whichever characters he wants to return and he’s got the multiverse as a ready made storytelling device to explain it all away.
The line goes directly from Peter’s Quicksilver to Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, who morphs into McKellen at some stage to continue his rivalry with Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier, friend and father figure to Jackman’s Wolverine – it’s just up to Marvel how they want to proceed from here.
