Marvel Cinematic Universe

A Serious Man takes place in the MCU and Wanda caused Larry's cancer and the tornado heading for his son.

So it probably means mystical realms like the Chaos Dimension or the Faltine dimension.

Yes. When Mutants start popping up people will have questions such as: What exactly is a Mutant? What makes them a distinct category from the many other enhanced humans in this setting? How do Mutants fit into this universe? Why haven't we heard of them before now?

Whatever movie introduces Mutants will be tasked with answering these questions, which is exactly why I think Mutants should be introduced in a movie that is about Mutants. If Whirlwind appears in Ant-Man 3 and is identified as a Mutant, people are still going to ask "What exactly is a Mutant?" and that will lead into all the same questions, but the answers to those questions will in all likelihood be unconnected to the plot of Ant-Man 3.

The reason they needed to make Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Film/Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger before making The Avengers (2012) was because those concepts were too complicated and unrelated for a single movie to properly introduce all of them. Hence the guy with the powered armour was introduced in a film about a guy building powered armour, the guy who turns into an irradiated monster when angry was introduced in a film about a guy turning into an irratiated monster when angry, the space viking with the magic hammer was introduced in a film about a space viking losing and regaining his magic hammer, and the World War 2 super-soldier was introduced in a film about a super-soldier in World War 2.

I really think you've got this backwards. Mutants aren't like the Avengers; Mutants are a single concept, and too complicated a concept to be introduced in a movie that's about something unrelated.

I can agree with that reasoning.

Now if we do want to build up to something, perhaps it should be the formation of the X-Men^note or at least their modern incarnation rather then the introduction of mutants as a concept.

A movie would only need to answer those questions in a movie about mutants in the first place. Putting them in non-mutant centric movies would be to establish that mutants exist and that people in-universe are beginning to react to them, that the concept reaches farther than specifically the X-Men, and generally helps normalize the concept for the audience by having it be widespread and visible.

The existence of guys like Whirlwind does not require an explanation of how mutants work, but does establish that mutancy is becoming a thing. On the flipside, the delivery of the entire mutant concept into a singular movie that does need to explain those things all at once invites significantly more heavy lifting onto that explanation than is strictly necessary. If costs little and adds a great deal in narrative ease.

Either that or you avoid that heavy lifting completely by making the mutant movies entirely self contained, which is ultimately a step backward.

I think the problem here is that you're conflating "they can spread out the delivery of the concept introducing it characters in unrelated concepts" with "they should completely introduce and explain mutants in a movie that doesn't have to do with mutants," which is of course not what was actually said.

The issue isn't, as I noted before, that the concept is too difficult to introduce in a single movie. The issue is that you're fitting a universe-defining premise into a pre-existing universe that has had little set up for that premise already. Or - again - what works for a self contained film must be handled somewhat differently for an installment in an ongoing universe.

A good analogy would be Civil War. If the first Avengers movie started with "this superteam exists, has for years, and has proven itself to be too dangerous to exist" right off the bat (or worse, in an MCU where the Avengers didn't cause collateral damage before then), it would have been difficult to work through - there's no context to the audience to relate to this concept. The movie uses the audience's experience with the previous films in the franchise to give Ross' agenda against the Avengers weight, allowing the film to fit comfortably into the universe in which it resides.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 21st 2020 at 10:27:57 AM

Considering the X-Men do have a lot of variety to them, it would be funner to have Mutant movies that don't entirely focus on Mutanthood.

Its like how Franklin Richards, the son of Mr Fantastic & Invisible Woman is a Mutant but its not really delved upon.

Edited by slimcoder on Sep 21st 2020 at 10:17:12 AM

When mutants first start turning up, they can just be people who have superpowers that they don't know the source of. Once you've got those characters established, <em>then</em> do a film that lays out the worldbuilding for mutants.

And all the while have the threat of the Sentinels or something built up, culminating in a movie where the first X-Men form together to stop them from committing genocide.

And if one wants to continue the trend of "Tony Stark is responsible for EVERYTHING", have the Sentinels be partly based on his suit or have Bolivar Trask be yet another disgruntled ex-Stark employee.

Edited by M84 on Sep 22nd 2020 at 2:13:06 AM

The entirety of Stark Industries is disgruntled by this point.

Can't wait for the reveal that Dr. Doom is Stark's former roommate.

I would love if the theme for the next group of films is the fall out of superpowers and superheroes being a thing, either personal (like in Wandavision), or in the vein of people trying to take advantage of the superhero situation for profit or power (which is already a theme in the Spider-Man films, and in regards to the government seems to be showing up in Falcon & Winter Soldier), now that Tony Stark is dead and the Avengers are off world. We could see trying to replicate Carol's powers over in Captain Marvel, people trying to go after gamma powers in She-Hulk, etc.

For the mutants, once the world discovers mutants are rising, this could involve people trying to manipulate mutancy itself on a genetic level: the main villain of the first MCU X-Men MCU film could be Mister Sinister.

Or I could see a redesigned Mojo a la Ultimate Mojo, as a human who kidnaps and dehumanizes mutants, forcing them to showcase their powers or run through games and gauntlets for the benefit of humans.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 22nd 2020 at 1:32:01 AM

They could also go with the superhuman trafficking angle like season 3 of Young Justice did.

Again, I feel the opposite. I don't think you can partially introduce the concept of Mutants. Saying "Hey! Mutants exist! We'll explain later." would be initially confusing and ultimately not take much weight off of the movie that eventually provided the answers.

Imagine if Iron Man 2 had had a secondary character who was Asgardian. That would have been confusing, right?

I was like that when I saw Hawkeye in Thor 1. I mean, I was floored when I realized that the guy aiming his bow and arrow at Thor was Hawkeye himself when he showed up in Avengers 2012.

Oh yeah, that had me puzzled at the time. I was not keeping up to date on who was cast as whom, and I did not make the connection between the purple-masked comic character and the snarky badass SHIELD agent who got an unexplained amount of focus. It was only when I read the Tropes page that I went "Wait, Hawkeye was in this movie??"

Edited by C105 on Sep 22nd 2020 at 3:08:56 PM

Reminder that we've had X-men films for 20 years, and thus, like Spider-Man, the concept of mutants is deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness and it ends ups boiling down to "oh cool, mutants are here too" rather than "what are mutants?".

Explaining the mutants is one thing, having them suddenly appearing into the setting is another. Spiderman was one friendly neighbourhood superhero who not even a lot of people in New York had heard about before Homecoming, so retconning him into the setting is no big deal. Suddenly revealing that there were groups of mutants fighting one another or bigoted governments is quite another and prone to raise even more questions than the retroactive addition of Captain Marvel and the sorcerers did.

I think the biggest problem with mutants is how are they going to be differentiated from inhumans?

That is, in the mcu they fulfill the same role that mutants usually fulfill.

Seeing as Inhumans weren’t present in the films proper, the answer will be to ignore them.

This came up before, but the problem isn't explaining mutants to the audience. As said, it's fitting the mutants' entire situation into the universe in a way that feels natural and not dissonant.

Iron Man 1 and 2 didn't introduce Asgardians (unless you count the "storms in the midwest" comment, and the Hammer appearing in the after credits scene), but they did introduce SHIELD, alongside with similar introductions in The First Avenger and Thor, to be more fully fleshed out later, so those early movies are no stranger to that kind of technique.

As mentioned already, this is essentially the same effect as Thor raiding a SHIELD base, Coulson being a secondary character, and Hawkeye cameoing in that movie, despite that movie not being strictly about them. It ensures their presence is keenly felt.

Most of the MCU movies have utilized that technique in some way or another. SHIELD's or the SSR appearance in various films before being fleshed out later. Thanos appearing in Avengers, Ultron and especially Guardians. Guardians 1 mentioning and showing Celestials but not exploring them until Guardians 2, and even then not fully. What appears to be SWORD appearing in Far From Home. Etc.

Of all the movies they've utilized this technique in, the only one that's ever found flak for it is Iron Man 2, and even so that's partially because as the series' inaugural series the Iron Man films were a bit more traditional than the rest of the MCU and the writing wasn't quite used to integrating these things. They never had a problem doing it again.

But like I said, gradually introducing things is literally the method behind Marvel's success. They've been doing it the whole time.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Sep 22nd 2020 at 10:05:38 AM

Of course, the early movies do have the advantage of being, well, early. The universe didn't already have established history that would raise the question of where SHIELD had been the whole time.

I'm not sure if the concept mutants are something that can be gradually introduced, at least not after a point.

In essence, if you introduce a single mutant character you have nessesarily introduced the concept of mutants with all the baggage that entails.

Now I do think what could be gradually built up to is the X-men. Since an organization of mutant protagonists isn't something that will have to be a thing on day one and perhaps it's best to do things differently then how the Fox X-menverse did things.

Edited by Falrinn on Sep 22nd 2020 at 3:34:30 AM

Well, conceptually mutants aren't particularly complicated. It's the beauty of the idea. It's when you get deeper into the X-Men centric things that the lore becomes very dense, but on a basic level the idea behind mutants is simply "people are getting born with superpowers, freaking out everyone else." This is actually one of the reasons the MCU has been missing out on not having the X-Men mythos avaiable - Marvel Comics has long used this simplicity to create tons and tons of mutant characters who are just... there. That property is extremely versatile - and that's why there's so many characters who aren't X-Men related who have mutants in their supporting casts or rogues galleries in the first place.

It's the impact they have in-universe that's tricky, but not quite as much given that at the very least the MCU has already introduced the idea that the public is afraid of enhanced individuals.

With all the world breaking stuff happening ever since Iron Man made his debut culminating in half the world getting dusted, the onset of mutants might make hell break loose. Surprising it didn't happen yet.

I've personally always felt that even in the comics, the themes of mutant prejudice are weakened by the weird internal logic that has to exist to justify "mutants = bad, other superheroes = okay." Those themes work a lot better in movies and shows that handle mutants as the only/primary superpowered beings in the world, like the the Fox X-men movies and some of the X-men cartoons.

That's why I'm in favor of having mutants appear in the MCU in one big poof. It gives them more of an alien, "outsider" quality that would help justify why the world at large hates these guys specifically, while still leaving room for stories where other superpowered characters (e.g. the Fantastic Four) have a good public image.