With a modern-day/potential near-future set MCU about to introduce the X-Men, how can they change up Magneto’s origin while staying true to the character’s core?
Magneto is probably one of the most emotionally complex X-Men characters in the roster. Having witnessed and survived the Holocaust, he harbours a deep-seeded resentment toward homosapiens, and sees Homo-Superior as the true next stage in human evolution, but the MCU has a bit of a problem.
The first X-Men movie is expected for 2028, which means we’ll get our first look at Magneto. If they kept his holocaust surviving origins, then at the very least, this would put Erik in his 90s.
I think most will agree that Erik’s childhood trauma is key to understanding his villainous motivations when leader of the Brotherhood, but having a 90+ year old man being the main villain I don’t think would really sell things, so how could they maybe change this up?
In my view, they could quite simply create a new story where mutants were put into concentration camps and subjected to their own Holocaust, from which, perhaps, they were saved by 70s or 80s era heroes.
Alternatively, and though I think this may wind up controversial, I think they could set it during another, more recent global Genocide; that of the Rwandan genocide of the 90s. Have Erik be a member of a Tutsi tribe but an element of it could be written to say there was a liberation campaign conducted by the Wakandans/Black Panther of that time.
Controversial because this is a genocide that still lives within very recent memory, and would obviously need to have Erik played by a black man which would no doubt set off a certain freakish corner of the internet.
What do you guys think? I’ve seen another suggestion before about simply making Magneto’s mutation also mean he ages very slowly, so while the character may actually be 90+, his slow ageing mean he still looks in his 50s/60s.
The first X-Men movie is expected for 2028, which means we’ll get our first look at Magneto. If they kept his holocaust surviving origins, then at the very least, this would put Erik in his 90s.
I think most will agree that Erik’s childhood trauma is key to understanding his villainous motivations when leader of the Brotherhood, but having a 90+ year old man being the main villain I don’t think would really sell things, so how could they maybe change this up?
In my view, they could quite simply create a new story where mutants were put into concentration camps and subjected to their own Holocaust, from which, perhaps, they were saved by 70s or 80s era heroes.
Alternatively, and though I think this may wind up controversial, I think they could set it during another, more recent global Genocide; that of the Rwandan genocide of the 90s. Have Erik be a member of a Tutsi tribe but an element of it could be written to say there was a liberation campaign conducted by the Wakandans/Black Panther of that time.
Controversial because this is a genocide that still lives within very recent memory, and would obviously need to have Erik played by a black man which would no doubt set off a certain freakish corner of the internet.
What do you guys think? I’ve seen another suggestion before about simply making Magneto’s mutation also mean he ages very slowly, so while the character may actually be 90+, his slow ageing mean he still looks in his 50s/60s.
Commentaires
First, Iger has been directing the movie division to remove anything related to politics. Elio's main character was reportedly queer-coded and that was removed, Hoppers had a climate crisis sub-plot reportedly removed, and BNW had content removed due to politics. There've been some leaks around individuals angry with Iger's direction of no politics as well.
Second, X-Men's date was leaked today. May 5th 2028 (Ironman's 20 year anniversary). May 5th 2028 puts the theatrical run right into primaries and presidential campaigns. Any movie in that window featuring politics that are planks in the presidentials is dead at the box office, 2028 is going to be a high emotions year with Trump exiting and both parties campaigning hard for untested candidates. People are going to reject movies that are considered extensions of political battles that are already exhausting them in the real world.
So the X-Men movie is almost 100% going to bypass the whole discrimination storyline and focus on tentpole blockbuster narratives.
Now, somebody who has no clue what on earth he's talking about & is almost always wrong about everything might make a claim like...
> So the X-Men movie is almost 100% going to bypass the whole discrimination storyline and focus on tentpole blockbuster narratives.
...but that would be utterly ridiculous, because it would gut the X-Men story of its *primary* theme.
There. Explained.
Superheroes with powers are just that, homo sapiens people with abilities. They aren't considered a different species.
Now, having said that, I wouldn't be angry to see the origin be shifted slightly for him to be a victim of mutant experimentation in the present day (akin to Wolverine).
Is it more impotant to keep the Holocaust alive or to show that these types of terrible genocides are more common then we want to think?
> In it, Walz argues that the lessons of the “Jewish Holocaust” should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on World War II. “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote. He then took a position that he noted was “controversial” among Holocaust scholars: that the Holocaust should not be taught as unique but used to help students identify “clear patterns” with other historical genocides like the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.
I don't like the idea of magneto being played by a black man, and his history being that of civil rights. I've heard this suggested, and I don't like it at all. Comparing the two is insane.
I'm so done with gender and race swapping at this point. They only do it so the fans will argue, and the people that don't even watch super hero movies, or sci Fi at all, can call everyone racist for not enjoying it. A bunch of middle aged, white guilt, white woman, with glasses and those jeans that are pulled up over their belly buttons to make a little bump, sitting in a room go " yes, so. We are remaking the Lord of the rings. who should we make black? Aragon? Ok done. Now who do we make a woman? Gimli? Alright. And gimli and Legolas can hook up. Or we can make Legolas a woman too.. and they're gay now". I'm liberal as fuck, I'm bisexual, my best friend is black, and my friends group looks like the village people. Every single one of them complains about this shit too.
I hate that I can't just say it bugs me, without feeling the need to write a book in defense of it, so I can reply to all the comments before I get any. Ocd is weird, I'll think of every reply I could get while I'm writing something, and try to defend my argument while making the initial comment. I wonder if anyone else does this. Or am I just weird. "Youre just weird " see im doing it right now.
It's never done for inclusivity. I promise. If it was, they'd pick another race, even once.
You could make them a black Palestinian, Eamonn Walker who played Kareem Saïd in HBO's OZ could pull it off. He could do the Rwandan genocide as well. But you need one hell of an actor to do it. And getting a super famous actor doesn't really work. A Sidney Poitier I'd about the only one that might. But he is long gone.
Denzel Washington is wrong for it. He is a great actor, he keeps getting floated for this, but he is just wrong. Jeffrey Wright maybe? You can't do a Jamie fox or will Smith. Yasiin bay, Djinmon Hounsou, or even Wood Harris, would be Interesting, mostly because I wanna see Avon Barksdale kicking ass.
Wood Harris acted alongside Idris Elba for years, and he stole the show in every scene. How Idris's career took off, but woods didn't, I'll never know. You'd be hard to find a tv series today that doesn't have a cast member of The Wire as a regular, or shows up at some point. I still think Wood is the best actor out of the whole thing. .
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A Cambodian magneto might be weird, but Pol Pot wasn't very long ago at all, and the glasses bit (where pol pot ordered everyone with glasses be killed, because he was scared of intellectuals) could fit into the history well.
If they do race change magneto to black, they need to do it because the story is right for it, and the actor nails it. If they just grab Denzel Washington and shoehorn him into a movie for the sake of it, it's just going to piss off the fans.
Magneto only works defending mutants the way he does, Because of the Holocaust. He saw horrible injustices, the worst of the worst of us at our worst.
The Holocaust is the single most horrific event in human history. Entire ethnic and religious groups were wiped out. Tens of thousands of family lines, gone forever.
There have been horrible atrocities, like the rape of Nanking, the Belgian Congo, Cambodian genocide, Rwandan genocide, etc.... But none of them come close to the scale of the Holocaust. Pol pot was 2.4million. Rwanda was 800k in 100 days. The Holocaust was 11 million people, in the worst imaginable ways.
It's why magneto being Jewish is soooo important to the story. If you made him a Palestinian, and had him attacking and killing Jewish people, for any reason at all, the outrage would be never ending.
I've heard this one floated, people suggesting making him Palestinian and saying what's happening over there is worse then the Holocaust. The only people saying that have never watched the tapes. Seen the photos. Or heard a survivor speak about it.
Band of brothers, a HBO series, steps into it for a bit. Hearing dick winters (one of the irl soldiers that stumbled upon the concentration camps with people still alive in them) talk about it is harrowing. They had noooooo idea this was even going on. So they went to nearby towns and grabbed the villagers, and made them come and bury the dead. The villagers all swore they had no idea this was going on. They're sobbing and throwing up, while being forced to bury them. The soldiers grabbed food from shops in the towns while the villagers angrily argued, not wanting to part with their foods.
When they handed this malnourished people food they started dying from shock of the food. They had to take the food away from them in fear they would die from over eating.
Generations later, descendants of these people have severe health problems still. Many of them put on weight really easily, and suffer a myriad of problems due to what their ancestors went through. It was such a horrible experience that it altered their DNA.
Think of how horrific something has to be, for your body to remember it so well that it effects your great grand kids. You pass down the trauma for hundreds of years.
So yea. When people compare anything to the Holocaust I get annoyed. And as one of the very few Jewish super characters, and arguably the most famous, I'd like for him to remain Jewish.
Denzels too old anyway.
But there's a very good chance it's not set now or in the near future anyway. It could be like f4 in its own universe. Or even in the f4 universe - that time is perfect.
So I think just keep the holocaust and set it in the 60s/70s. Easy peasy.
I like an older magneto with grey hair too. Grey hair, British accent, and he needs to be a presence.
Lee Pace in foundation with his armor on, with the long hair. Take him, grey his hair, and change the armor from blue to red, and add a cape, and you have how I'd like to see him played.
Honestly Lee Pace would fucking killlllllll it as magneto. If you haven't seen foundation, and you like sci Fi, I can't recommend it more. Season 1 is a little slow, because it's building the world. But it gets amazing.
I can't find a gif of it on here, but yeah lol.
He kills the commanding presence. Lord of the rings, foundation, Ronan in guardians of the galaxy. He would be my personal choice for magneto hands down.
I haven't watched season ii yet. Both the tv series and books leave me - mixed. So much to like but also some weird choices. But I love sci fi so I guess it's time to jump back into foundation.
But yeah Lee Pace is everything we need from a Magneto. Needs to either be a seperate universe or f4 universe. The more I think about it the more the f4 universe makes sense. I don't want to think about it anymore because anyone else but Lee will be a disappointment now.
The recent season just ended on a hell of a cliffhanger, so you might want to wait until the next season is started at least, if not finished, before going back to it.
Yeah I'm with you. Lee was wasted as Ronan, that character could have been played by hulk hogan and it wouldn't have changed much. Lol.
He could play an older magneto by aging him a little or even just keeping him this age
I don't think the f4 universe has mutants? But neither does the main universe. Magneto needs to have been around for a while, his powers can't be new. So mutants need to be around for a while at least.
I think a separate universe is it.
My guess is thats how they get into the MCU, alll the earth's merging, and mutants join as do the f4. .. it gets confusing with the f4 though, their technology is wildly different, and in some ways just or more advanced. It's weird lol.
Doom breaks it in doomsday, and the following film puts it back together. That's what I read they had planned anyway.
The experimentation option i feel changes a good amount of his character. It can easily be made to work but the Holocaust wasnt a single person being traumatized, or even a small group of people. It was hundreds of thousands. I feel like Magneto being as angry at humans as he is fits better with his origin being tied to such a widely spread tramautic time. Could just be me though.
I prefer that to "ageing slowly" because it allows Magneto and Xavier to be the same age and contemporaries (despite Erik spending his early life in a different era)...at least as much as Steve Rogers and Tony Stark can be contemporaries.
When Magneto was first revealed to be a holocaust survivor it was the 80s so the readership was primarily baby boomers or gen xers. For that audience his origin was powerful because it was very recent history, their parents might have been veterans or have witnessed Nazi atrocities.
Regardless of how you try to keep him eternally young you can't alter the passage of time and turn back the clock on the audience's relationship to an event that happened eighty years ago. That doesn't mean that a modern audience can't relate or be horrified by the Holocaust but that it just can't connect to their contemporary existence in the same way any more.
So you could for instance still have Magneto with the same exact origin in X-Men comics being published in 2125 but the audience is going to be as disassociated from World War Two as I am from the Great Famine in Ireland. I can empathise with the struggles and experiences of Irish people living and dying in that terrible event but it still feels disconnected from my life because of how long ago it was.
I'm not saying use Krakoa as an 'entry-point' necessarily. But maybe back in the 50's Erik explored Krakoa, died at some point, but was resurrected a decade or two ago. That's when he meets Xavier and they initially plan to set up a new mutant society on Krakoa, but then they have their falling out...
Having Magento have an apprentice from the Rwandan genocide would be cool though. It could be used as a way for Magneto to eventually become a good guy, or have the apprentice become good after he realizes Magneto is going too far.
In the event that mutants are part of the main universe then a non-frozen magneto would need to be at minimum 80 years old to have been born in a concentration camp at the end of WWII. Assuming doomsday takes place in 2025
/s
Slightly hilarious too, but actually an interesting multiverse idea!
He has generational trauma and faces a new horror like the ones his parents did.
Unless they want to lean into a new refugee comparison or something but that's a big change. Otherwise it feels like the MCU needs to go to them, not bring them to the MCU.
Sadly, there are many situations to chose from.
For the MCU, I don't think I would go into detail with it. He shouldn't be a major character for a while, and there are plenty of other characters these films should focus on.
You could even have him as a modern day Israeli, or just from the Middle East in general. That area has had a lot of killing due to releigion and ethnicity for a long time.
I think another challenge is to find a good motivation for the character. Killing all humans isn't really a good motivation. Maybe something to do with political power and wanting a mutant state. Could even tie it into Israel and Palestine.
Plenty of ways to explain his longevity.
In X-Men Evolution he used the same Vita Ray chamber that turned Steve into a super soldier to keep himself young.
or have the original Magneto be long-lived but not incredibly powerful. Instead, he finds a protege, a survivor of another genocide (let's see if Disney has the balls to be political). They bond, and Erik shares stories of the Holocaust, and trains his protege to be stronger, to protect the nascent mutantkind.
Hell, Secret Wars itself could be used to explain it...somehow.
It just seems like that's the point of the multiverse - you can have a clean setting for each story with convolution.
It's not like mutants are going to be looked down on in the main MCU timeline. Kamala khan loves being a mutant and all the supes are idolised - even hulk and abomination, literal monsters, have massive fans.
Magneto: “GOD DAMMIT, CHARLES!”
I would stick with The Holocaust and aging slowly.
Most of these super powered characters would age slowly if they were real. They have crazy stamina, healing and levels of invulnerability. The things that ages, effects and affects us are nothing to them.
Just say that the X-gene makes some Mutants age slower
Either that or have Magneto be put Frozen/cryo-sleep sometime in the 80s
And he wakes up in the 2020s
To that end I always think the easiest way to tweak his origin is to just have that a fictional genocide happened in the MCU about twenty or thirty years ago. That way Magneto can remain a normal age but his tragic origin remains intact.
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He's part of a sub-species of humanity that is possibly the next step of human evolution. I think 'groundedness' went out the window the day he first graced a comic-book page.
It's a comic book movie. Magneto being a Jewish Holocaust survivor is absolutely crucial. I have no objections to a Black Jewish actor playing Magneto, as there were some cases of Black Germans who survived Nazi Germany, but the Jewish aspect cannot be simply replaced with a other form of marginalization and to do so would be straight up offensive.
Frankly, Marvel Studios is lacking severely on the Jewish rep front. Ben Grimm is the only example of a Jewish character whose Jewishness was preserved on screen*
If we get the X-Men, I want them to actually engage with Magneto, Shadowcat, and Iceman being Jewish. No more excuses, especially after Fox. There's legitimately interesting stories to tell there and their Jewishness adds depth and nuance when it comes to a story of minorities surviving in a world that hates and fears them.
*(I'm not counting Wiccan given that Billy Maximoff pretty much took over the corpse of a Jewish boy and the Maximoffs have been whitewashed to oblivion in the MCU of both their Jewish and Romani heritage).
First off, Marvel is just *never* going to do away with the Holocaust origin for Magneto. Tom Breevort actually talked about it on his substack a while back...he said that it would never change and that they were simply going to have to find some way to explain his age.
Personally, I lean towards the idea that Erik either went into some sort of suspended animation or Limbo, or time-traveled. That's by far the simplest answer. DC has just done it to the *entire* JSA in their "New History of the DC Universe", so I think Marvel can manage it for one (more) character.
The way I'd so it is that sometime in the 1950's or so, Erik (or whatever his name was back then) goes into Limbo/statis/a time-portal. Whatever it is, he re-emerges roughly 25-30 years ago. That's when he meets and befriends Charles Xavier (who's about the same age as him, though born decades later), they have their falling out, and he becomes Magneto. About a decade later, you have the events of X-men # 1, with Magneto attacking Cape Citadel and encountering the O5.
That's for the comics. And a variation can be applied to the MCU.
I think this works pretty neatly because it allows you to have Magneto as a contemporary to Xavier despite them being born in different decades. And it keeps him relatively young (in the comics of course, he eventually gets de-aged at least once).
He has magnetic powers, there’s iron in blood, thats a good enough technobabble explanation for why he has slowed aging imo
In the comics, this was an issue as well, but they had a cosmic being turn him into a baby, and then grow back up younger than he was deaged from which helped kind of obscure how long ago the holocaust was from the sliding Marvel timeline.
The movies *could* do this with Nanny, who de-aged Storm, rather than the Stranger, who did it in the comics.
They could also make him the child of a survivor of Auschwitz, who grew up watching all the pain his parents went through.
Simply make an actual mutant genocide event, that is allegorically similar to ww2. This war should not be dated, and essentially always be "about 30 years ago", long enough for old timers to recall, but young people don't.
Hell, maybe Cap helped defrost Mags when he was on the run. By the time he's entered the story he's acclimated, sought out Xavier, and is pissed.
They were strict isolationists, didn’t get involved in worldly affairs. That only changed because of T’Challa and Kilmonger.
Even if it didn’t conflict with established MCU canon, I think they’d be courting controversy by establishing that Wakanda stopped that genocide. There were no superheroes coming to save those people, no ordinary people either
In real life, the Rwandan Genocide was looked at as a civil war, an internal affair. The international community ignored the atrocities. Belgium tee’d it up by instituting a strict caste system that coded Tutsis as less than others. France armed the genocidal government against the tutsi minority. France and Belgium organized evacuations to safer areas, and forced the Tutsis off the trucks, where they were summarily executed on the spot. The UN stepped in, wrung their hands and bandied about.
It was only 1994, well within living memory. If they went with that angle, they would have to tread very carefully and there would almost certainly be huge consequences for misrepresenting aspects of it.
Which makes me think they would never go there