I Don’t Care About Binary! Tell Me About the X-Men!
Well, Binary may never have been an official member of the X-Men, but she did help them fight the Brood. She also hung out for a while with the Starjammers, a team of space-pirates led by Cyclops’s dad, Corsair. So that should count as an X-Men for you, right? No? Okay, fine. There is the issue of the physician, a blue-furred man who introduces himself as Dr. Henry McCoy.
Hank McCoy is, of course, the Beast, one of the founding members of the X-Men. Moreover, he’s played here by Kelsey Grammer, who portrayed the character in the 20th Century Fox-produced movies X-Men: The Last Stand and briefly in X-Men: Days of Future Past. He stands in a lab designed like that of the Xavier Mansion in those movies and mentions Charles, obviously in reference to Professor Charles Xavier.
So yes, the X-Men are now in the MCU. Or are they? We’ve seen Fox X-Men drop by the MCU before, first with Evan Peters playing Pietro Maximoff in WandaVision (even if that turned out to be an Agatha prank), then Patrick Stewart as Professor X in Multiverse of Madness. Furthermore, we know that Hugh Jackman has grown out his mutton-chops to play Wolverine again in Deadpool 3.
Thus far, these have amounted to little more than cameos, not the actual, real live X-Men of the MCU. Stewart’s Xavier wasn’t even the Fox version of Xavier, with that film being set in yet another universe parallel to both the Fox films and MCU proper. So is Grammer’s Beast a sign of things to come or just another wink at characters not ready to make their proper MCU debut? This post-credit scene doesn’t help answer those questions, although if we had to guess Grammer’s Beast suggests that when see Monica Rambeau again, she’ll be coming into a major crossover film with more familiar faces…
The Other Post-Credits Scene That Isn’t a Post-Credits Scene
Beyond the X of it all, The Marvels includes the introduction of the next great team in the MCU comes with a question: “You think you’re the only kid superhero?” Strangely though, the query is not posed at the end of the movie (where we suspect it might have been originally intended for in the edit) but is instead, jarringly, the final scene of the movie before the credits. And if that question feels kinda familiar, it’s because Nick Fury said the same thing (kinda) to Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man when he began to assemble the Avengers.
The scene plays out pretty different in The Marvels, and not just because it actually happens before the credits roll. It begins with a shadowy figure entering a building and assuring her golden retriever that she brought home some pizza. The figure doesn’t need to walk in the light for us to recognize that good boy as Lucky the Pizza Dog, which means that our archer is Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), last seen in the delightful Hawkeye.
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