MAJOR SPOILER ALERT FOR AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR AND MINOR SPOILER ALERTS FOR MAYBE EVERY OTHER MCU MOVIE
Well, now that we got that disclaimer out of the way…
Avengers: Infinity War completely shattered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we knew it last April. Major characters died in the first scene, we met new characters and even more new worlds, and despite pulling out all the stops they had, our trusty heroes couldn’t stop the villain in time.
And then Thanos snapped his fingers and half the universe died.
Sure, the upcoming Spiderman: Far From Home and Black Panther sequel kinda spoils the fact that characters who died in the snap won’t necessarily stay dead after Endgame, but a catastrophe as big as half the universe dying begs the question “where do we go from here?”
My guess? The Young Avengers.
Disclaimer #2: I don’t know the finer details about the Young Avengers, but I have enough knowledge to see how the MCU could incorporate the YA into their upcoming movies.
Disclaimer #3: The Avengers and Young Avengers movies and comic books all belong to Marvel.
So why do I think they’re aiming towards Young Avengers?
The question that started it all for me is: ‘who is that girl with Clint?’
She’s only shown in a short blip from the second Endgame trailer, but it certainly caught my eye. My first thought was that she was Lila, Clint’s daughter, but the timeline doesn’t match up. This is Lila Barton in Age of Ultron:
Look how little she is. I’d put her age at…what, 8 at max?
And given how AOU is set in the same year the film was released, this is how old Lila is in 2015.
Now I know time travel is likely to play a role in Endgame in some capacity, but look at Clint from the first trailer:
versus this:
For one thing, the hairstyles don’t match. But look at his face. Look how dragged he looks, how haunted. I think it’s fair to say that not all of his family survived the Snap. And if anyone in his family is dead, I highly doubt that he’d look so relaxed and carefree when he’s with the girl. Therefore, I’d put this shooting session as occurring BEFORE the Snap, so it can’t be happening any later than 2018, three years after we’ve been introduced to little Lila.
That is NOT an 11-year-old girl.
So who is she?
Going off of her jet-black hair, her age, and her skill with archery, I think she’s supposed to be Kate Bishop. In the comics, Kate and Clint were friends/occasional partners and both shared the mantle of Hawkeye. Given how Clint seems to be training her, I think it’s safe to say we’ll be seeing more of her in the future.
Next is Cassie Lang (Stature).
In the comics, Cassie had been exposed to Pym Particles enough in her youth that she could change her size at will, enabling her to take up the mantle of Stature. In the Ant-Man movies thus far, though, Cassie has been way too young to be a superhero:
But she DID express interest in becoming one, best shown in Ant-Man and the Wasp when she tells Scott she wants to be his partner.
Not only that, but she is now going to be played by 17-year-old Emma Fuhrlong instead of 11-year-old Abby Ryan Fortson.
So how could she become Stature? Well, given how much Cassie loves the superheroing her dad does, it could be that she watches him shrink and grow enough that she’s been exposed to Pym Particles. Otherwise, she could get her own suit or work with a surviving prototype of Hank’s. In the aftermath of a disaster as horrific as the Snap, I could see how a brave girl like Cassie would be interested in following in her father’s footsteps.
Those are the two Young Avengers characters we have physical evidence for, but there are two other members that have already have the beginnings of an origin: Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, the pseudo-twins of Scarlet Witch.
There’s no indication that movie!Wanda is interested in children as of yet, but there are still a few nods as to how Billy and Tommy came to be. For starters, she and Vision ARE in a relationship, much like they are in the comics.
Their marriage and desire for a family is a big part of what made Wanda wish the twins into existence in the first place. Though movie!Wanda doesn’t have reality warping powers and works more with telekinesis/telepathy, she is EXTREMELY powerful, to the point where she is able to attack the Mind Stone AND hold back Thanos and the rest of the Infinity Stones at once. Given that the Infinity Stones are the essence of creation and destruction AND that Wanda’s powers derive from them, it’s quite possible that she hasn’t reached her full potential yet and that we could see a lot more from her.
On the other side of things, Vision, in his non-glamoured form, is very colorful. But when Thanos rips the Mind Stone from his head?
Could that be a reference to a time when he was rebuilt stark-white and emotionless? Because in the comics, that was the beginning of the end for Scarlet Witch and the android. Soon after the breakdown of their relationship, Wanda’s children’s souls were absorbed by a demon named Mephisto and Wanda basically broke reality and…comic books are weird sometimes, just in case you haven’t noticed.
Long story short, after all that, the souls of Wanda’s twins eventually entered the bodies of two different children, Billy Kaplan and Tommy Shepherd, who had powers matching those of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. If Wanda survives and Vision is rebuilt without the Mind Stone, would the MCU take them down a similar, hopefully less confusing path? Well, now that Doctor Strange has introduced magic into the universe, almost anything is possible!
Lastly, Captain Marvel provided a strong foundation for one more Young Avenger, and that’s Teddy Altman. Teddy is a half-Kree, half-Skrull shapeshifter, conceived in secret during the Kree-Skrull War and smuggled to Earth as a baby. While the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie first showed us the Kree, Captain Marvel brought the Skulls and the KSW to the big screen, so Teddy’s introduction to the films’ continuity would be easier than ever. The fact that his Kree parent, Mar-Vell, is sympathetic to the Skrulls, sheltered Skrull refugees, and has lived on Earth for a while is just icing on the cake.
I’m sure this is going to be a recurring theme with these fandom fillers, but this post ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would. And these aren’t even half of the Young Avengers’ members. There’s still time traveler Nate Richards, depowered mutant David, Super-Soldier-serum-experimentee Eli Bradley, a kid version of Loki, a young counterpart to Vision, and aliens Noh-Varr and America.
Sure, these guys might not have quite the same foundation that the movies gave Kate, Cassie, Billy, Tommy, and Teddy, but with a bit of creativity and artistic licensing, Marvel could introduce the full team if they wanted to. For example, 20th Century Fox owns the X-Men franchise, but that didn’t stop the MCU from including Wanda and Pietro, powers and all. The Maximoff twins just have a different backstory and origin now.
Or the studio could just stick with these five for the time being. It wouldn’t be the first time the filmmakers didn’t use all the characters for a team. In the comics, Hank Pym was a founding member of the Avengers. In the MCU, he’s not introduced until Ant-Man and he’s much older.
You get the idea.
Marvel could make it work.
It would be a great way to continue the saga. The Avengers are SUPER POPULAR in today’s world, so of course Marvel Studios would want to keep capitalizing on that interest. But introducing more and more new characters to the same team makes it hard to balance character development and screentime. Not to mention that making a movie out of a comic book arc is hard. There’s a lot of adaption and streamlining you have to do to make the story comprehensible and sometimes you have to leave out huge chunks of material entirely.
Captain Amercia: Civil War is a good example of that. Over half the characters involved in that comic saga weren’t shown on screen and the entire premise had to be reworked because in the MCU, there wasn’t as much of an emphasis on secret identities.
With so many movies already produced, it’s going to be harder and harder for the MCU to incorporate the different character arcs into one cohesive storyline. There are so many different runs of comics to work from, true – House of M, Ultimates, even Marvel Zombies – but they all feature different backstories for the SAME CHARACTERS. Eventually, the studio would run out of usable plot points that wouldn’t contradict what’s already on screen.
It might also, somewhere down the line, be a relief to some of the current actors. They all do such wonderful work and it’s clear from all the behind-the-scenes footage that they’re having a blast, but who knows what the future holds? Maybe they’ll want to try a different role, or retire from acting all together. With a fresh cast of characters, the portrayers of the Avengers could pass the torch to Young Avengers, just like superheroes pass their mantles to their sidekicks so their names become legacies.
I could be completely wrong. Perhaps some article will come out tomorrow and disprove this. Perhaps there’s an article out already that disproves this and I just haven’t seen it yet. But I hope I’m not. I like learning about the Young Avengers and I’d love to see them be adapted to the screen, and I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I don’t want to see it end.
I guess we’ll find out!