Marvel‘s Multiverse Saga is now three years deep, but it still feels like it’s yet to fully kick into gear. Especially as we’re not entirely sure how the Kang plotline is going to play out, amid all the Jonathan Majors legal drama.
In many ways, the exciting thing about the Multiverse Saga is what happens after it, not during it. Phases Four through Six are all set to lead up to 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, widely touted as a soft reboot of the MCU which will see the Marvel multiverse rebooted, thereby allowing for various continuity changes and for new characters to enter the fray. Most notably, some kind of rebooted X-Men team.
With Marvel throwing familiar X-Men faces at us every project lately, it almost feels like the studio is beginning to jump the gun and is getting started on its next saga already. But is the so-called Mutant Saga already in the works?
The Mutant Saga is the most likely name for what comes after Secret Wars
The latest rumor doing the rounds on Marvel Twitter (excuse me, X) claims that Elizabeth Olsen is set to return as Scarlet Witch in a big way post-Secret Wars as Wanda Maximoff will be a leading player in something called the Mutant Saga. According to this rumor, Scarlet Witch will be retconned as a mutant herself and be outed as Magneto’s daughter, as per original comic book continuity.
Putting aside the fact that Wanda is officially dead right now in the MCU, the biggest revelation contained within this rumor is the Mutant Saga concept. This is something that has rolled around the fandom for a while now as an imagined name for what comes after the Multiverse Saga, based on how we know Marvel’s going to lean into the X-Men in such a big way.
It certainly is easy to believe this is what’s on the horizon, to quote the opening caption of 2000’s X-Men, in the not too distant future. As of right now, it’s practically impossible to simply drop the X-Men into Earth-616 and pretend like they’ve been there all along. That’s why Marvel is having to simply bring in legacy stars from the Foxverse as variants of their old characters. See Patrick Stewart in Doctor Strange 2, Kelsey Grammer in The Marvels, and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool 3.
And yet it really should be stressed that this is just online chatter as Kevin Feige — who’s so tight-lipped he could put Black Bolt to shame — has never given us the vaguest hint at the MCU’s third saga. Nor is there any concrete reportage to back this up. The Mutant Saga, and Scarlet Witch’s role in it, should probably only be considered a widespread fan theory at this stage, then.
For now, let’s just remember that we have a whole lot of the Multiverse Saga still to go, with likely many twists and turns ahead of us before Phase Seven gets here and kickstarts a new era for the MCU.
Published: Dec 5, 2023 12:20 pm