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| As my kids get older, these guys come out of the toy box less and less. But where the MCU is concerned, there's still a lot of runway left for them. |
To illustrate this point, I'm going to use my next few posts to break down more than 60 villains and associated storylines that could act as the tent poles for future MCU phases. Some are low-hanging fruit--stories that simply expand on existing plot threads and themes. Others are deep cuts, some of which would represent course changes in terms of the tone of the MCU. And many are mutually exclusive, as they represent cards that can only be played once--slots in the overall narrative of the Marvel movie universe that can only accommodate a single film or character.
Today, I'm going to start with the handful of stories that I think are a lock to make it to the big screen at some point in the future either because they've been so obviously hinted at or because the characters are so iconic--what I like to call The Obvious Eight. (In reality, they were--until recently--the Nefarious Nine; but I'm on the fence about one that I've relegated to a later wave for reasons that could be a spoiler for people who haven't seen Captain Marvel. So we'll simply call that the Plot That Shall Not Be Named... at least for now.)
So--drum roll, please...
Presenting - The Obvious Eight:
- #1: The Fourth Host of The Celestials
- #2: The Beyonder and The Secret Wars
- #3: Kang and The Council of Kangs
- #4: The Sinister Six
- #5: Maximum Carnage
- #6: Galactus
- #7: Emperor Doom
- #8: Scarlet Witch and The House of M
The Fourth Host of The Celestials: While I list this one first, it's likely to be the least familiar to casual fans. And Marvel has even provided some red herrings that could complicate the appearance of these villains in their comic book forms. But there are clues that suggest that these Space Gods are lurking in the future of the MCU.
In the comics, The Celestials are inscrutable, near-immortal giants who seed worlds with life and then revisit them over hundreds of thousands of years to observe progress--sometimes terminating their experiments through wholesale genocide.
The name has been used to describe Ego the Living Planet and it is seemingly a Celestial whose severed head now serves as Knowhere. A Celestial is also shown, during The Collector's explanation of the Power Stone, using the gem to wipe out the surface of an entire planet.
But it's Disney's addition of an Eternals movie to their upcoming slate that makes these nigh-omnipotent beings a cinch to appear either in that movie or shortly thereafter. The Celestials created The Eternals, a hidden race of largely earthbound superhumans--so it's hard to imagine telling the story of the latter without delving more deeply into the back story of the former.
It's also quite likely that the assembling of the Infinity Stones is just the sort of impetus that would lead to the Celestials stepping out of the shadows to investigate.
The Beyonder and His Secret Wars: After the Infinity Gauntlet, it may be difficult for some people to think of another threat with sufficient scope to follow. So what about a villain with the power to create a shimmering millions-of-miles-wide rift in space and assemble a planet from pieces drawn from across the galaxy? And what if that villain could assemble an eclectic group of heroes and villains from across time and space in an epic throwdown for whatever their hearts desire? Yeah--I think that would do the trick.
As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I'm pretty partial to the original Secret Wars story--more than Secret Wars II and the recent revisitation of Secret Wars--though I could see the earlier and later stories serving as bookends at the beginning and end of an MCU phase. Timed correctly, these stories could blend the current reality hosting the MCU with one containing the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. (Not the only possibility out there though--read on...)
Kang(s): I'd thought that the cross-time conqueror Kang would have entered the fray much earlier than this, but I recently heard that the character may pose some problems when it comes to worldwide marketing of Marvel properties. That said, he's arguably The Avengers' greatest villain--so, if there's any opportunity to include him in ANY form, I really feel like Disney needs to act on it. And with time travel apparently playing a big part in Avengers Endgame, it makes sense that such activity could either attract Kang's attention or even provide an origin story for him. So it's hard to imagine Marvel not getting this done.
And given the fact that there's not just one Kang--that there's a near infinite number of Kangs from different timelines opposing or supporting each other, even forming a Council of Kangs--the story possibilities are likewise nearly infinite. (It would also be particularly fun to see his sword-shaped starship headquarters--Damocles Base--on the big screen.)
The Sinister Six: So, this is an idea that literally should have happened on multiple occasions over the last decade-and-a-half. We've seen incarnations of all but one of this villain team's initial membership across various adaptations of Spider-Man: Doc Ock, Sandman, Electro, Vulture, now Mysterio. And given that the Scorpion's alter-ego, Mac Gargan, was seen in Spider-Man: Homecoming, it's easy to picture him serving as a replacement for the absent Kraven The Hunter.
What might not seem likely is that these villains could collectively pose a phase-ending threat. But they've actually made some really significant power plays in the comics--threatening Earth from destruction via satellite, affecting global weather, etc. I could therefore picture a well-reasoned story that introduces some of the AWOL Sinister Six members building to a similar world-spanning, world-threatening climax.
Maximum Carnage: This one is a bit of a cheat, as it's something that is obviously coming--just likely not to the mainstream MCU. With the success of Sony's Venom movie, we're clearly going to see Venom square off against his offspring Carnage in that studio's MCU-adjacent movie universe. That said, I'd love to see Sony really maximize the value and menace of the younger symbiote by following not the Maximum Carnage storyline from the 90s--which saw Cletus Cassidy build a posse and run riot through Manhattan--but rather the Carnage USA storyline from 2011. That story saw the symbiote infect and take over an entire Colorado town as well as numerous human and superhuman responders to the disaster--a scope fitting to serve as the culmination of a phase or trilogy.
Galactus: This one is tough to reconcile, but it's also been talked about non-stop since the announcement of the Disney/Fox merger. While I think I tend to be more forgiving of the depiction of Galactus in Fantastic Four: The Rise of The Silver Surfer--hey, come on, you can see his shape in the center of the energy cloud--that depiction rendered him simply as a force of nature. And while it's true that Galactus operates on a plane where he's largely oblivious to the lives of the lesser beings whose planets he consumes--out of necessity, frankly, if he's to stay sane throughout his immortal life--his previous cinematic treatment really missed out on an opportunity to show him as a fully fleshed out character.
He is clearly an entity that fans desperately want to see--but I find the possibility of him being featured in the current-state MCU a bit problematic. Because, as I've noted above, certain threats seem like they fill an exclusive slot--and The Celestials and Galactus may simply be too similar as gigantic existential threats to individual worlds. They have appeared in stories together--have even fought each other in the presence of lesser beings in stories like Earth X and Jonathan Hickman's run on Fantastic Four. So featuring both in the MCU isn't impossible--especially if fan interest is high--but it could require some creative storytelling.
Emperor (Doctor) Doom: If Galactus is iconic, then Doctor Doom is simply next-level. To the extent that Fox's efforts to adapt the Fantastic Four haven't received a lot of critical acclaim, it's generally accepted that Victor Von Doom--one of the most compelling villains in all of comics--is ripe to be reinterpreted in the MCU. It's hard to imagine this preceding the introduction of the FF, but anything is possible. Since Doom is best shown as a layered, complicated character who can sometimes even straddle the line between villain and antihero, you could certainly show him numerous times in multiple lights across multiple films. (I've enjoyed Michael Fassbender's portrayal of Magneto, so I'd look for Marvel to cast someone who can deliver an equivalent performance.)
Interestingly, Doom has sparred with characters ranging from Daredevil to the Silver Surfer in his comic book appearances. In some ways, he's a utility villain--a megalomaniac who can be trusted to rise or sink to the level of his opponents. But when used best--whether it's stealing the powers of one of Galactus's heralds or even The Beyonder, or augmenting the abilities of the Purple Man to brainwash the entire world into recognizing him as emperor--he's more than a match for all of the heroes in the current or future MCU combined.
House of M: This one is another cheat, or it would be--but not mine. This story provides a simple way to integrate the MCU and the Fox-owned Marvel properties in a story with a smaller scope than Secret Wars. In the comics, Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, demonstrates how massive her powers are by changing reality on multiple occasions--first in the events of Avengers Disassembled (where she unintentionally manifests numerous deadly threats to her own team), next in changing the world by putting humans under the rule of mutants, and last in depopulating the world almost entirely of mutants.
But what if the MCU was coming into the story half-way? What if Wanda had already eliminated all mutants and the memory of them prior to the events of the first Iron Man movie? And what if that revelation led to her fixing what she'd done?
It would certainly provide a tidy and self-contained way to integrate the universes while selectively keeping as much of the current MCU as Disney would desire. Either way, the not-so-subtle hints at the extent of Wanda's powers make it very likely that some version of this story will make it to the screen.
OK--that's it for the low-hanging fruit. Join me for my next post where I dig a little deeper into Marvel's back catalog to identify other boss-level threats and the preconditions necessary for their implementation in the MCU.
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