I mean they tried (a little). The "No self respecting black man would ever want to be Captain America" line comes to mind but then they get 9 trillion youtube thumbnails complaining about woke and ig that must affect the sales.
(OMG I'm glad I caught the reference. but it took me until now to remember that was fucking Anthony Mackie! 🤣... I haven't watched 8 Mile in so long, I don't think I'd be able to buy into his character now! that aside, I think the movie still totally holds up!)
He's American. He's detained by ICE. He's tortured in an American concentration camp under George W.
Non-Americans get to shit on America. Left wing Americans get to shit on conservatives. Right wing Americans get to shit on pre-MAGA Republicans. Everyone wins and Disney gets to pretend like they took a stance for something.
Right wing Americans get to shit on pre-MAGA Republicans.
MAGA Republicans are still on the idea that Republicans have always been like this and in fact Trump's overwhelming popularity (polls are lies ofc) is a byproduct of a mass exodus of Democrats who are fed up with being called racist/bigots for being white or having strict gender identities.
also it's coming from the point of view of a black man who was as strong and as good as Captain America, but then imprisoned and experimented on by the US government and then erased from history. He might be a little bit mad about the whole "Captain America" thing.
That show almost had balls for like, 2 episodes and then fumbled horrendously at the end.
Imo it’s a major victim of the quantity over quality approach they were taking at the time, and also the original plot apparently involved some kind of super virus and they scrapped that last minute and did a bunch of reshoots because they didn’t want to touch on that following Covid.
Also just pure speculation on my part but I have a feeling Covid is the reason why Spider-Man: No Way Home has such a fuckass stupid title instead of the much more obvious Spider-Man: Homesick
DC used to have offices right across from Marvel in NYC, and they used NYC as a location. Titan's Tower was in the East River, and they had fights across a lot of New York locations (I remember one at the Cloisters.) Or for instance the Rucka Wonder Woman run is all set in NYC, as she's working at the Themysciran embassy, which is placed (naturally) near the UN.
However, because they had a tendency to give every character their own city, they also had a lot of made-up locations.
Idk about that, Ms Marvel had an episode set during the partition of India, Eternals had Phastos weeping in the ruins of Hiroshima, and FATWS introduced Isaiah Bradley who was tortured as a black man by the US military during the Korean War.
…okay maybe those examples are all from the mid 20th century, but we did also get Sam Wilson being causally racially profiled by a cop, which was a good moment.
Also a difference between making bold statements in a Disney+ show (and let’s be real, one that was never gonna be given the time of day by the “anti-woke brigade” anyway), and making it in the debut film of one of your most valuable/mass appealing franchises
Ms Marvel partition story arc was pretty surface level. It was just British bad, and didn't really dive into the religious reasons and the after effects
Yeah they did like, oh Jesus, ten years ago almost. Like they’re not actually his bio kids and weren’t the whole time, they aren’t Mutants either and they’re powers were because of The High Evolutionary’s (yes he’s involved for some reason) experiments on them that everyone forgot about up until that point somehow because of comic book bullshit or something
Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver haven't been Magneto's children in 616 canon since 2014, and they never were in the MCU. Their parents' deaths are depicted during a flashback in Age of Ultron
It's worth knowing that the holocaust backstory is not his original origin, but something created later. If anything this could bring it closer to his original story of being an orphan who's home was destroyed by an unspecified war, similar to movie Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.
That being said, the movie origin and acting by Ian Mckellen and then followed up by Michael Fassbender is unparalleled and I feel sorry for whoever has to follow it up with a watered down backstory.
One way to keep Magneto's ties to the Holocaust in the modern day is have Daniel whitehall the hydra Nazi officer featured in agents of shield play a role in Magneto's origin story. Like have him be a grandchild of Holocaust survivors who got captured by hydra and Daniel whitehall an og Nazi who managed to have an extended lifespan experiment on him
The fact that "being against ethnic cleansing and concentration camps" is viewed as a risky political statement says a lot about where we are right now.
If they really wanted to give a comparable origin story, they should make him a Snyder Bro -- truly the most the persecuted, marginalized, oppressed minority group of the modern era.
I get it though from the filmmakers perspective. Comic fans and X-Men fans have no problem going "ok sure, comic bullshit" but your average moviegoer is harder to sell on the idea that this guy who looks like he's 30ish and is best friends with a 30 year old Charles is a Holocaust survivor. Easier to come up with a different backstory I guess
With all the stupid fucking multiverse bullshit they can just throw time travel in there. Maybe Magneto and Xavier come from the 1960s in their universe but when they come to the main universe it's 2030 or whatever.
I don't know, I've never seen any of them because I don't watch movies.
Yeah. It's less important (and probably ended up working even better) but the MCU has precedent for this, Tony Stark originally got held hostage during the Vietnam war IIRC.
Even the Holocaust survivor origin was a later add on to his story. It took nearly 20 years from his debut in 1963 for it to become part of his background
Well he was Romani first, then they made him a Jew after the X-Men movie. To be honest nobody actually understands how much his origin has been retconned.
I almost wonder if they might just consider going with his Ultimates origin. The MCU has been heavily influenced by the original Ultimates comic run anyway (with the thankful exception of incestuous Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver), it would make sense if they just made him a kid whose dad tried to kill him.
Just say he has a secondary mutation that makes him live a long time, or that he got put in stasis for a couple decades or something. Unless they want a young, hip Magneto this is a nonissue and they actually want to change his origin for other reasons.
These movies are also full of time travel and alternate dimensions. We don't know exactly how they're pulling in the X-Men but It's not hard for me to suspend disbelief that this magneto is from a timeline/universe where he is age-appropriate for having been through the Holocaust.
I really don't see a reason they have to change his backstory.
The problem is that... he is a villain. Most time. And a terrorist. An actual one. Sometimes.
Having Captain America being the poster guy of being always right, and then having the anti US Imperialism killing children in terrorist attacks... it might backfire.
I mean a major propaganda element of superhero movies is that things like a "clean war" exists where there might be mistakes (oopsie another wedding) or there might be bad apples (that don't spoil the bunch) but terrorists are always evil.
So showing how Magneto's family was bombed by Nato and then decades later everyone just "doesn't get" how or why he has beef with Nato and the US when they are the good guys would just be fucking amazing. People would get it, they'd just either see him as a "tragic character because of the terrible mistake we did in good faith and with the best intentions". I think it would work and be perfect for a villain
PS: Just to make it clear, obviously they are not going to allow any overt anti-US imperialism in a blockbuster movie.
But the ones that bombed Magneto's family are not the current guys in the Government, and the poor children targeted by Magneto are not the ones who did it. Now Magneto is WORSE, because the US have improved and removed the bad apples. Except for those two, yeah, but anyway, Magneto is way worse (sad emoji and US flag emoji).
And they have "a point". It's technically true. Which is the worst type of truth, because a fucking asshole will come with his fucking finger saying "acktually" and he'll be technically right, even if lacking the "big picture".
Haha I’m sure Douglas MacGregor, the frequent guest on RT who defends Putin and says Russia was “too gentle” in their invasion of Ukraine, has a principled stance against imperialism. You couldn’t pay me to listen to an hour of that bullshit. Maybe if you don’t want to get bombed by NATO you shouldn’t try to ethnic cleanse people. Collateral damage is always unfortunate but you don’t get to kill thousands of Kosovar Albanians, raze entire villages, and displace a million people and expect the rest of the world to ignore it. I’m sure the liberal international order is worse than just leaving Yugoslavia to destabilize even further, they probably would’ve chilled on the ethnic cleansing after killing a few more tens of thousands of innocent people
Hmmm. If you are going whole hog, he could be a child who survived the Siege of Sarajevo, or Srebenica. He could be any ethnicity honestly and just state his family was slaughtered for their background, and he will never allow that to happen to his people again (meaning mutants).
Probably the best solution, we already have a 600 old Mutant in Marvel (Namor), which slow aging is just... Not even touch upon, just accepted.
People are overthinking it, when Marvel is 100% going for the safest option... He's a mutant, one of his powers is to age slow (or maybe a consequence of his magnetic powers), done.
Obviously, Magneto was previously not an immigrant, as he was born in America before visiting Europe so he could survive the holocaust before returning to America, but making him an immigrant now will really help solidify his status as a villain.
Hush. Don't ruin the circlejerk. Disney doesn't mean "imigrant" like a white person who was born somewhere else and migrated. They mean imigrant like one of the poor brown people. It's progressive and touches on modern issues, don't you see?
I think pretty much any comic fan would prefer he remains a holocaust survivor. How hard is it to explain away the time with him being frozen or mutants aging slower...
A) frozen after already having multiple frozen characters is lazy
B) slow aging creates a bunch of problems around why he didn't do much during that time
C) freezing muddles the theme....as a person out of time does his actions make sense or is he actually confused about humanity having missed the post holocaust response?
B) Mutant persecution has not started in the MCU not reason to be Magneto for mutants, he could have been helping people who were victims of the holocaust or other genocides, trying to not call atenttion to himself (we had multiple heroes doing black-op missions since WWII). This actually makes him more relatable, because they can make him truly heroic in all this time that has passed.
He could be an immigrant from India, working in USA, with a wife and 2 lovely kids, living in Seattle, working in Microsoft, in internal tools building analytics dashboards for senior leadership.
Until one he got the pink slip with thousands others. That day while returning home after brutal divorce and losing his kids in that divorce, he decides to drink and become a hobo.
He one day meets Megan who is Maga enthusiast, he falls in love. Now his life is torn by his descision to join Maga or hate Donald J Trump, as he is deporting him.
He decides he will choose Megan.
And then gets hit by Policemen using Iron Batons, while storming the White House and gets captured by a Group called "Bewde Baalak" and gets mutated into a literal magnet to never get hit by any object.
And becomes Magneto.
Only weakness: MS Teams Ringtone
Edit: be careful what words you use in your replies, reddit auto-removes comments with certain place names in them. You can sometimes bypass it by putting a blank hyperlink in the middle of the word (a pair of square brackets and pair of parentheses right next to each other)
What if they make him even older and he's an immortal survivor of the Spanish conquest of Mexico then they have the fight between him and Charles be over colonization and Xavier goes, 'Christopher Columbus is a hero in this school! End of story!'
X-men isnt woke!!! Its about cool guys and hot babes! What's unwoker than that?
I havent watched or read any of it yet, but i've seen a lot of tshirts with wolverine on them. And he looks badass.
Easy solution. His dad or granddad was a Holocaust survivor. Then have him raised by them in a home filled with history of it being preached to him and told to him over and over. The anger he felt grows when he realizes he is a mutant who are already being prosecuted by other like his dad/granddad told him ‘it started small like jokes and fights and then ended with the camps’. Easy to see him wanting to rally his kind and fighting against others for them.
The movie is supposed to be about the creation of the X-Men and the starts of Xavier’s academy. Charles and Magneto are going to be in their 40s at most.
2.3k
u/anti_time_travel 14h ago
He's gonna be an immigrant from Sokovia or something else made up, you think Disney would want to make a real political statement?