(Spoilers for season one of Ms. Marvel on Disney+ ahead.)
Ms. Marvel just changed the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it.
Since their first team-up in 2012, The Avengers have been the headlining team of the MCU. But the July 13 season finale of Ms. Marvel on Disney+ officially confirmed the next team of heroes Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has been waiting years to introduce: the X-Men.
In the last scene of episode six, Bruno (Matt Lintz) informs his bestie Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) that there may be more to her powers than the ones unlocked by her family's otherworldly bangle. "Kamala, there's something different in your genes, like a mutation," he tells her, followed by a snippet of the X-Men: The Animated Series theme song.
What does this mean? For starters, Kamala may be the franchise's first confirmed mutant, which is a major shakeup from her comic book origins. In the comics, Kamala is an Inhuman (another group of super-powered people), and unlike the X-Men, her powers were dormant until she was exposed to a magical mist.
Ms. Marvel may be the first MCU property to drop the word "mutant," but it's not the first to reference the X-Men. After all, Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch is one of the most famous mutants in Marvel comics. Similar to Kamala, Wanda discovered that she always possessed her abilities in WandaVision and that they were fully unlocked by the Mind Stone.
The introduction of mutants into the MCU has everything to do with business. For years, film and TV rights for Marvel properties had been split between many studios. 20th Century Fox—who was behind the original X-Men film series starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Ian McKellen and more—previously owned the team's rights until Disney announced it was purchasing the studio in 2017.
Now that Disney has access to the X-Men lineup, Ms. Marvel all but confirmed that we'll be seeing heroes like Wolverine and Storm join the likes of the Hulk and Captain Marvel down the line. Plus, we already met an alternate version of Patrick Stewart's Professor Charles Xavier in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
So, it looks like mutants have always existed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and we can't wait to see what comes next.
Season one of Ms. Marvel is streaming now on Disney+.