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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
My preferred first villain for the MCU is Mr. Sinister.
Monsterous Mad Scientist with an interesting design and cold, calculating personality.
Edited by miraculous on Oct 6th 2021 at 4:02:38 AM
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."How do you downplay Xavier though?
Like, he's kinda the one who makes the team a thing. You can't have the X-Men without Xavier.
I suppose you could have him being a past influence, but has stepped back and let other characters lead, while still being an occasional mentor figure.
One Strip! One Strip!X-Men '92 had Magneto dead for one to show off the rest of the villain gallery.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Xavier can be downplayed as more of a mission control type. I think it’d be almost impossible to do a first movie without him, but there have been multiple points in comic history where he’s been relegated to the background and the team has run itself, both as supers and as a school.
I don’t think it would be impossible to avoid magneto completely, at least initially. If they do us him, I’d like to see his arc from complete villain to anti-hero, rather than the revolving door he kept going through in the Foxmen series. One of his most interesting roles was when Charles asked him to mentor the New Mutants, that could be a new take on the character
I still think they should've introduced mutants here and there in other characters' movies, before addressing the situation in an actual X-Men film (for which I agree Mr. Sinister is the best choice).
I'm still shocked that Whirlwind seems to be making no appearance in the Ant-Man series whatsoever. He could've been Sonny Burch's Elite Mook in Ant-Man 2 or something.
There's still the possibility of Mystique and Rogue on The Marvels, though their choice to do that or not might be predicated on whether the sexist mob is still rallying behind that idea (and I still kind of want the villain to be MODOK instead).
Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 6th 2021 at 5:35:35 AM
I think it'd be quite a simple choice to just have so that Xavier and Magneto as Posthumous Character types to differentiate the MCU X-men from the Fox-Men (and Xavier spent something like a decade dead in the comics anyhow before Krakoa). Maybe reveal later that Magneto isn't actually dead, but I'd be up for "Xavier and Magneto existed and died already" as a opening status quo.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Yeah, that'd probably be my play. Xavier and Magneto as the old school heroes parallel to the real life civil rights movement.
Imagine Hank and Janet having to spy on Xavier and Magneto due the government suspecting them of "communist sympathies" allá the FBI keeping tabs on Malcolm X and MLK.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."I would be down for a 60's-70's period of the MCU, but I don't know if Marvel Studios would be willing to invest in that too much as in the films. Like how Star Wars is pushing the High Republic era in books and comics, but none of its upcoming films or tv shows (except maybe The Acolyte, but also maybe not) are planning to cover the period and instead seem to be staying the course.
I think the question of how best to do Xavier and Magneto is ultimately going to hinge somewhat on how mutants are going to be integrated into the MCU.
You can't have Xavier be a retired or posthumous character who founded the X-Men and handed the reigns over to the next generation if the X-Men didn't exist before.
And there's no perfect solution to this problem, every option is going to have tradeoffs.
I'm personally in favor of having it so mutants have always existed, but in extremely few numbers and then either an event happens that causes or a recent event is revealed to have caused the number of active mutants to skyrocket.
This allows both a large population of modern mutants and for historical mutants to exist when it's especially important to their backstories, but also explain why no one has ever bothered to mention the fact that there's a whole subspecies of superpowered individuals running around.
The tradeoff is that it does sound a lot like the Inhumans, but I'm willing to accept that as a price worth paying to resolve the other issues.
Not sure where this places Xavier and Magneto, but I think it would be hard for them to exist as purely historical characters in this scenario. Their ideological divide doesn't work as well in a world where the two of them represent 20%+ of all active mutants and almost no one knows mutants are even a thing.
Edited by Falrinn on Oct 6th 2021 at 6:12:45 AM
Magneto and Xavier as 60s heroes but instead of a focus movie or show right away have a cutaway sequence to them when explaining that mutants have always been around
Forever liveblogging the Avengers

We've seen that we can have complicated, but still firmly villainous characters with Baron Zemo, Vulture, the Mandarin and Thanos. I never got that from Lawrence's Mystique, where they just tried to force her to be an Anti-Hero with hand waves as to how she became villainous in the first three films because Hunger Games was popular. And Lord knows Jennifer Lawrence can't be a bad guy in a movie.
Edited by MatthewWayne on Oct 6th 2021 at 4:01:29 AM
"I'm Mr. Blue, woah-woah-ooh..."