Marvel’s WandaVision and What’s Next for the MCU
Here's all the ways Marvel's WandaVision set up the future of the MCU, from Captain Marvel 2 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to other big movies and TV shows.
This article contains WandaVision spoilers.
WandaVision has concluded with a terrific final episode, and with it, Marvel’s first foray into episodic television came to an end with startling success – taking a quiet story about a woman’s grief and loneliness, one of the most emotionally evocative pieces of MCU storytelling to date, and using it as a thread in the greater MCU tapestry. And that tapestry is unequivocally bigger now that the show is ended. Here are some of the pieces of groundwork WandaVision laid for the future of the MCU.
The Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange 2
Lots of people found it odd that the show used Wanda’s real name in its title when the rest of the MCU uses superhero code names. We know why now: the Scarlet Witch is itself a title, one that Wanda embraces by the end of the show. And now it looks like she’s going to be a huge deal for the future of the MCU.
Wanda ends the show by defeating Agatha Harkness and basically putting her back “in character” while the rest of the Westview illusion dissipates, then letting go of her own grief, dissipating the hex around Westview, and taking the Darkhold, (Agatha’s comprehensive guide to evil magical knowledge that named the Scarlet Witch as the magic user who would eventually destroy the world) to the woods to study for a bit.
Wanda is now, to put it mildly, a BIG DEAL. The Darkhold, Agatha tells us, predicts that the Scarlet Witch would inevitably be more powerful than the Sorcerer Supreme, which makes a ton of sense knowing that Wanda is heading to Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness next.
Young Avengers
Or maybe not? Because the last thing we hear in the show are Billy and Tommy’s voices calling to their mother that something is wrong.
Billy and Tommy, like colorful Vision, disintegrated when the hex dissipated. They were entirely constructs, which meant their powers were loaned from Wanda, their personalities derived from her, their existence a nice fiction. Just like in the comics, where Billy and Tommy were absorbed into Master Pandemonium’s hands and never heard from again.
Except the time they joined the Young Avengers.
Here’s how the comics did it, and I bet how the MCU will too: Billy and Tommy were shards of Mephisto’s soul, captured by Wanda and put into hex magic constructs to be hers and synthezoid-so-not-capable-of-reproducing Vision’s kids. When they were reabsorbed by Mephisto, they ceased to exist, seemingly for good. Later, Tommy Shepherd and Billy Kaplan, two seemingly unrelated teenage boys, are united by virtue of their powers (Tommy is a speedster and Billy uses something that seems like hex magic) on a team of teenage Avengers stand ins. After several adventures, Billy and Tommy discover the truth about their powers: they are the reincarnated shards of souls that previously inhabited the made up Billy and Tommy Maximoff. So they’re kinda sorta actually Wanda and Vision’s kids. At least in their hearts.
A running mystery about Westview was “what happened to all the kids?” And that question was only partially answered during the show – some kids showed up after Wanda was confronted about it, while Dotty (actually a woman named Sarah) begged Wanda to let her daughter out from where she was locked up. We know prolonged exposure to the Hex gave Monica Rambeau her powers. It doesn’t feel like much of a leap for two random kids trapped inside the Hex to have also absorbed Billy and Tommy’s memories and powers when it came down.
Considering how much Young Avengers stuff is being laid on the table elsewhere – from Kate Bishop in the Hawkeye show, to Cassie Lang and Kang showing up in Ant-Man 3, to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier exploring the history of the super soldier program, this feels like a rock solid lock to come back.
Monica Rambeau and Captain Marvel 2
Monica Rambeau, the newly powered Photon, is pretty clearly headed for space.
In the mid-credits scene, Monica was taken aside by what appeared to be a SWORD agent, who revealed herself as a Skrull and indicated that somebody in space was looking for her. That somebody is pretty clearly Nick Fury, who was last seen in Spider-Man: Far from Home working with Skrulls, based on a space station, and dealing with interplanetary and interdimensional threats to Earth.
Through the entirety of WandaVision, SWORD was about monitoring “sentient weapons,” a pretty significant departure from its comics counterpart. Its comics counterpart is much closer to SHIELD but for aliens, something we all expected to happen when we saw Fury hanging out on that space station. It looks like that’s coming true, and the next logical place for that to happen would also be somewhere where we can explore the simmering discontent Monica has with Carol that she expressed at one point during the show. Also Monica’s powers are really cool and should be featured just about everywhere they can be.
It’s a safe bet that we’ll see Monica reappear on the Ms. Marvel TV show, and she’s long been confirmed for an appearance in Captain Marvel 2.
The Fantastic Four
This is just rampant speculation, but our belief that the seeds of the Fantastic Four in the MCU were sown in WandaVision remains strong. The SWORD uniforms are too close to F4 outfits, and the seemingly new mission of SWORD is too close to the Fantastic Four’s origin for there to be another easy, obvious way in. It’s very easy to imagine four SWORD agents, two of them siblings, getting caught by some cosmic rays on a mission in space and catching superpowers.
This also has the added convenience of giving them proximity to the Skrulls, historically as large a part of Fantastic Four lore as that of the Avengers. It’s just too easy to miss, even if neither Reed Richards nor Victor von Doom didn’t end up being the teased aerospace engineer.
X-Men and Mutants in the MCU?
Certain Denizens are adamant that we also saw the dawn of the mutants and thus the first seeds of the X-Men on screen in WandaVision. The theory goes that Wanda had latent powers that she used to defuse the bomb when she and Pietro were little, and the fact that the two of them were the only ones to survive exposure to the Mind Stone indicated latent mutant abilities activated by the stone.
This theory feels like the biggest reach, but we will admit that there is something to Pietro having latent powers that allowed him to survive. That is probably the strongest circumstantial evidence for this theory, that WandaVision is also the dawn of the X-Men joining the MCU. But it’s still a little bit of a stretch, and if it was the launch of Marvel’s merry movie mutants, we’re sure to get more teases in upcoming shows and flicks.
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Jim Dandy has always been a comic geek, but it wasn't until recently that he started gaining a variety of other interests and skills through his…