How are you feeling after seeing The Marvels? X-cited? X-static? X-hulted?
Okay, okay, I’ll stop with the X jokes. But you can’t help but admit that they’re on theme, given that The Marvels‘ mid-credit scene finally introduces the X-Men into the MCU.
The MCU has been building to this crossover since Disney acquired 21st Century Fox back in 2019, giving them the rights to the X-Men. Marvel has teased the X-Men’s arrival with Pietro Maximoff’s (Evan Peters’ version) appearance in WandaVision, and with the confirmation that Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) is a mutant in Ms. Marvel. Now, four years after the acquisition, we get our first official look at what the X-Men in the MCU will entail.
The Marvels ends with Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) sealing up a hole in the fabric of the universe and trapping herself in an entirely different reality. In the mid-credit scene, she wakes up in an infirmary in the X-Mansion, aka the X-Men’s home base.
There, she’s greeted by Hank McCoy/Beast (played by the X-Men films’ Kelsey Grammer), who tells her she’s now in a reality parallel to her own. One key feature of this reality? Monica’s mother Maria (Lashana Lynch) is back. Kind of.
This version of Maria is different from the one we first met in Captain Marvel. She doesn’t know who Monica is, and she’s wearing a supersuit of her own, one that’s red and white and emblazoned with two golden stars. That color scheme and symbol point to one possible answer for this Maria’s superhero alter ego: Binary.
Who is Binary in Marvel?
Binary is an alter ego of Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) who was first introduced in the Uncanny X-Men comics. Later iterations of Binary saw her as a clone of Carol. However, every version of Binary possesses immense cosmic power, making her one of the strongest characters introduced into the MCU to date.
With Maria Rambeau taking on the mantle of Binary, it’s clear the MCU isn’t taking the “Carol clone” approach, but rather re-inventing the character to give Maria a larger role down the line.
This mid-credit scene wouldn’t be the first time the MCU has hinted at Maria in a Captain Marvel-type role before, either. In the Illuminati sequence in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Maria also appeared as a different universe’s version of Captain Marvel.
So how did Maria-as-Binary get her powers in this new, X-Men reality? Perhaps she blew up a Kree energy core, like Carol did in the main MCU reality. Or maybe she’s a mutant who encountered some other cosmic force. However it happened, it looks like Maria Rambeau is here to stay — a blessing, given that Lynch has proven her star power in The Woman King and No Time to Die.
The Marvels is now in theaters.
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“The Marvels” mid-credits scene introduces characters from one of Marvel’s most famous super teams. (No, not the Avengers.)
