With Joss Whedon‘s mention, on the red carpet of Iron Man 3‘s Los Angeles premiere, that he’d managed to “lock” in his favorite brother/sister characters into the script for The Avengers 2, comics fans were very surprised, for a semi-complicated reason. It seemed very much like Whedon was hinting at the roles of Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, alias Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, reformed members of a terrorist group who were a major part of the second incarnation of the Avengers, lead by Captain America.
What’s surprising about this is that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are mutants, and were long thought to probably be characters that Marvel Entertainment couldn’t touch due to licensing agreements that left the X-Men and their supporting characters with Fox Studios. But was Whedon really hinting at Magneto’s wayward twins, or at a different sibling pair? According to Entertainment Weekly’s sources, it’s mutants all the way down.
The magazine is running a cover and feature on Iron Man 3, but also promise as much information as they can about Marvel’s Phase 2 of their Cinematic Universe. According to their unnamed sources, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are in for The Avengers 2, despite Fox’s license on the X-Men, presumably due to their long canonical association with the Avengers rather than the X-Men having left them in some kind of middle ground. EW even asked Marvel Entertainment president of production Kevin Feige directly whether the twins would be in The Avengers:
I’m not confirming or denying. The draft could change six months from now.
Which, as MTV Splash Page points out, sounds an awful lot like current drafts of the movie include the two. While Feige is right to hedge his bets around script rewrites, Whedon seemed pretty certain last week that his new “brother/sister act” were not going to disappear in editing.
Whether Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver manage to keep their origin story intact or whether “mutant” really will be a bad word for Marvel Entertainment (at least until Fox relinquishes their licenses on the X-Men… don’t hold your breath) remains to be seen. But at least we can look forward to having more than one lady superhero in The Avengers 2. Above all, don’t expect them to be officially confirmed for a while now! The Avengers 2 won’t hit theaters until 2015, so casting won’t be happening for a while.
(via MTV Splash Page.)
