Ms. Marvel has finally ended, leaving the young Kamala Khan with a flashy new outfit as she begins to gain mastery of her superpowers and gets ready to make some MCU connections in The Marvels next year. However, to many fans’ surprise, the biggest revelation didn’t come in the mid-credits scene but in the utterance of the dreaded m-word.
Marvel Studios is and always been quite careful in referencing mutants in its films, due to legal reasons at first but then so as not to ruin the careful introduction of its precious new mutants after Disney got a hold of the X-Men in 2019. Since then, WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Madness had only teased the X-Men, though in non-permanent fashion, until this week Brian Bruno told Ms. Marvel she’s the MCU’s first official mutant.
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What Do These Changes mean For Ms. Marvel?
Even before the show premiered, Disney Plus’ promo art and teaser had all but confirmed one thing, Ms. Marvel’s powers would be radically changed in the series compared to her comic book source material. As many might know by now, Kamala Khan’s storyline, her powers were awakened by coming into contact with the Terragen Mist substance that so happened to unleash her Inhuman side.
The Inhumans, of course, was that failed series pushed by Marvel in 2017 that had remained untouched until Sam Raimi and Kevin Feige decided to bring back Black Bolt just so he could get his brain crushed by the Scarlet Witch. The Doctor Strange sequel was -in a way- the perfect statement from the studio to let fans know the Inhumans were officially out of the picture, yet on a bigger scale, it also meant that the X-Men’s arrival would continue to be delayed as Sir Patrick Stewart and Evan Peters could only exist in fabricated realities or other parts of the Multiverse, not in the MCU’s Earth-616.
All this has changed now. The MCU is known for making a few twists here and there so that Marvel Comics’ storylines fit in better within the boundaries of cinema, especially in its early days when fewer properties were available to the studio, so giving Ms. Marvel a larger more important group where she can belong is key for a young character that offers the possibility of having a Spider-Manesque story arc as producers have said.
The faint sound of the X-Men theme says it all, the MCU is making Kamala a mutant and there’s no going back from that. Sure, changing her powers also helped construct a family-centered origin story with few history lessons, but in the end, the master plan for Ms. Marvel makes her a much more interesting character going forward because she’s 100% real in Earth-616’s sacred timeline.
So When Are The X-Men Coming?
To sums things up, Ms. Marvel is a mutant of some kind who might not possess the fabled X-gene but does have purplish kinetic powers similar to those wielded by Gambit, whose true magic potential was unlocked by a family relic that’s been heavily implied to be a Kree artifact. Captain Marvel swapping places with Kamala all but confirms Ms. Marvel’s bangle is in fact a Nega-Band, thus firmly giving her a set role in The Marvels, only now also having extra work by having to pay off potential ties with the X-Men as well.
Funnily enough, with this iteration of Ms. Marvel being one of the newest characters in the comics, her latest source material even features an unlikely team-up with Wolverine, though don’t count on that being how she crosses paths with the X-Men. The Marvels is a 2023 movie that’s already written, much like Ms. Marvel was already done a while ago: whereas the animated X-Men ‘97 is the one project that was announced much later.
Suffice to say, The Marvels has a lot of homework, and clearing up the exact origin of Kamala’s mutation is not necessarily at the top of the list considering Monica Rambeau’s parallel story with Carol Danvers and whatever cosmic threat they might face. What all this amounts to is that Ms. Marvel is in the enviable position of having two different storylines that writers can work with from now on.
X-Men ‘97 is reviving the beloved 90s classic, however, given the current rules of the Multiverse and the fact that the MCU appears to be pointing at a Secret Wars scenario as the end goal of this new era, where the X-Men are a key component, animated heroes transcending into Earth-616 shouldn’t be ruled out.
Ms. Marvel had a tough time as it’s widely speculated it’s been Disney Plus’s least watched series, nevertheless, having Kamala be the MCU’s first mutant signals the studio’s intent to keep her for the long run. The X-Men will come when they’re read — for Kamala being a mutant means she’ll eventually get to exist in a setting that’s not constrained to a limited teenage series, maybe as part of the world created by Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.
Ms. Marvel is currently available on Disney Plus
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