The House of M is a storyline that a slew of fans want to see play out in the MCU. Ever since Avengers: Age of Ultron introduced Wanda Maximoff into the MCU, fans have been speculating how Marvel Studios intended to do the storyline without any mutants being around.
Now Mutants are headed into the MCU, and Wanda Maximoff, for all reasons and purposes, has been pronounced dead. How, then, will the Marvel Studios work in the House of M storyline into the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
A rule of thumb when it comes to fiction in general, is that if there is no body shown on screen after a character has died, they can be presumed to be alive. Given that there was a very distinct red explosion before Wanda Maximoff was ‘crushed’ by the debris on Wundagore Mountain, there is a very potent case to be made that the character might be returning pretty soon.
Now, all that remains to be seen is why Wanda would have any beef with the X-Men, given that in the MCU, she has no reason to associate with mutants.
Wanda Maximoff’s House of M in the MCU could concern Sorcerers, not Mutants
So far, Wanda Maximoff has become heavily involved with Sorcerers in the absence of mutants in the MCU. While this is also the case in the comics, Wanda has the mutant population and Magneto to connect her and her brother, Pietro to the mutants.
However, given that Pietro is now dead, and mutants are still not widely known in the mainline MCU, Wanda’s drama with the superhero community is mostly focused on her status as a Witch. While Wanda redeemed herself at the end of Multiverse of Madness by sacrificing herself to destroy the Darkhold, there could be plenty of reasons why as Wanda could come back and cast a worldwide spell, dictating that Sorcerers do not exist anymore.
To begin with, the MCU treats a myriad of different powered individuals as sorcerers and magic users. Thor’s mother, Lady Frigga was a witch. America Chavez, whose powers are focused on traveling the multiverse, is also thought to be more of a magical superhero than one based on science-fiction.
There is of course, Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers, who work with a a different kind of magic, and then there is Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff and other witches like Agatha Harkness. Safe to say, there are a lot of different types of magics that exist in the universe and could be the perfect stand-in for mutants in the MCU. Given their varied powers and what can be achieved by them, removing these characters from the MCU will definitely have an impact on the superhero community.
Removing magic from the universe could also affect other characters like Moon Knight and Iron Fist, who also have their powers rooted in magical concepts like gods and spirits. Now, the question stands, why would Wanda Maximoff wipe out sorcerers in the wake of Avengers: Secret Wars?
Once Secret Wars is done, the question that will be posed is what is Marvel Studios going to do with the Multiverse. Keeping it open would indicate that there is always some sort of multiversal threat looming, which is something fans have already become sick of.
Then there is also the fact that the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and the Avengers all need to start existing in the same Marvel Universe, such they can regularly cameo and interact. Given that there is an incentive to be done with the Multiverse come Secret Wars, there needs to be a narrative reason for Wanda to shut out sorcerers.
To begin with, Baron Mordo, who started his quest to balance the magical scales with the thesis that the number of magic users in any given universe needs to be culled, could ally himself with Wanda, or work towards ‘resurrecting’ her (if she is truly dead as indicated by the upcoming Agatha All Along show) to meet this goal.
This would also allow the Marvel Mutants to stick around in the MCU, rather than being nerfed immediately as they join the sacred timeline. Wanda Maximoff might reach the conclusion that the entirety of the Multiverse saga might have been a sorcerer problem all along, who have been drawing power from various alternate dimensions that might have been causing incursions in the first place.
It could also be possible that removing sorcery from the universe is the only way to defeat someone like Doom, who sits at the center of Secret Wars as the chief antagonist, or even Kang for that matter.