The MCU entered the world of streaming television with a splash thanks to WandaVision, a show about how TV can help us deal with — or escape from — the tragedies of our lives. But while the series changed the MCU, it didn’t deliver everything that hardcore fans wanted. A popular theory speculated that Mephisto would appear, but that didn’t happen until Ironheart four years later. Others wanted Nightmare to emerge, but that didn’t happen either.
In other words, WandaVision was a great show, but one that left a lot of the Scarlet Witch’s comic book stories in the closet. Now, years after her last live-action appearance, actor Elizabeth Olsen still wants to dive into something neither WandaVision nor its spiritual sequel, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, had the bandwidth for.
During a Los Angeles Comic-Con panel with Paul Bettany, who played her dead android/fantasy sitcom husband Vision, Olsen expressed her love for House of M and hoped the MCU would explore it in the future. “I don’t know how to make it make sense, you guys, but maybe there’s some fan pitches or theories out there, but I just think it would be so fun to deal with X-Men and Avengers and ‘no mutants.’”
House of M, written by Brian Michael Bendis, is a comic storyline about Wanda creating a false timeline where her two children are alive. That sounds a lot like the plot of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but with a twist: this reality-warping fantasy comes at the cost of basically every mutant’s powers. When Olsen mentions “no mutants,” it’s a reference to the Scarlet Witch’s devastating words that almost wipe out the X-Men forever: “no more mutants.”
Back when WandaVision was new, House of M theories had to hand-wave the X-Men away, as the thought of introducing them into the MCU was just Kevin Feige’s fantasy at the time. Now, however, we know that the X-Men will be integrated into Avengers: Doomsday, so anything is possible.
But how could House of M be incorporated into the MCU? One theory is that it could happen in the upcoming Vision Quest, the spinoff focused on the recently revived White Vision. Showrunner Terry Matalas was present at LA Comic-Con, and star Paul Bettany described the series as being “about intergenerational trauma… fathers and sons and denial of pain and denial of your own truth and coming to terms with who and what you are.” House of M is all about denial, no matter the cost, so a version of this story could fit the description.
Elizabeth Olsen has been talking about House of M for years, and it clearly served as inspiration for both WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness. But Vision Quest could adapt the storyline in full, bring Scarlet Witch back for one last dance, and give the X-Men one heck of an introduction to the MCU.
