For many people, Avengers: Age of Ultron was not the best follow-up to the primary Avengers film when it was released in 2015. Then a funny thing happened along the the way to Avengers: Endgame; it turned out that Avengers: Age of Ultron had grown in popularity after the MCU paid off many of the things that happened in that film. It took a film that people thought was “okay,” and turned it into a critical link in the MCU chain. In other words, with the benefit of hindsight and future development, the film became the behemoth Marvel had originally envisioned. This article will propose that Captain America: Brave New World can accomplish this feat but in a much grander fashion and it could mean much more than Age of Ultron.
Before we get into the meat of what I mean, it should go without saying that we’re going to be discussing HEAVY SPOILERS. Stop reading right now if you don’t want to have something spoiled for you. I truly mean that, as we’re jumping right into one of the major reveals of the film and there won’t be any time to avert your gaze before you read something you don’t want to read. This is your last chance to powder out before you read a spoiler. Now that people have been sufficiently warned, let’s begin.
One of the big reveals in the film is Thunderbolt Ross having secretly built a prison and lab called Camp Echo One to house Samuel “The Leader” Sterns and allow him to develop gamma radiation experiments future. What Ross didn’t know was that the main person Sterns was experimenting upon was none other than himself. Ross had secretly been taking Gamma pills for almost 25 years and it’s these pills which provide the catalyst for his change to Red Hulk. While the Red Hulk is an interesting character, it’s not the most interesting thing Marvel could do with Camp Echo One with just a little “retcon” that wouldn’t even have to be considered a retcon as they wouldn’t be changing its purpose, but rather providing a more in-depth explanation and a better name for said facility.
For Marvel comic fans, names like Project Rebirth, Weapons Plus, and Project Wideawake should be immensely familiar. It doesn’t matter if you read Captain America or the X-Men or Punisher, every one of them has some tie to one or both of these projects. In fact, you’ve already seen Project Rebirth. It was called Captain America: The First Avenger. Steve undergoing the change from Steve Rogers to Captain America courtesy of Abraham Erskine is quite literally Project Rebirth, but the U.S. Government renamed it to Weapons Plus after Erskine’s assassination by Hydra. You’ve also seen Project Wideawake, but not in the MCU. Project Wideawake was the Sentinels in X-Men: Days of Future Past. I guess now that Wolverine is in the MCU, then maybe it does count as MCU, who knows?
Captain America was also the first step in the Weapons Plus program, though it was called Project Rebirth until Erskine’s death. He was Weapon I. Wolverteeny was Weapon II; Skinless Man is Weapon III; Weapon IV is Isaiah Bradley from Brave New World; Nuke from the Jessica Jones season 2 (Will Simpson) is Weapon VII; Wolverine is Weapon X; Huntsman is Weapon XII; Fantomex is Weapon XIII; The Stepford Cuckoos are Weapon XIV; Ultamaton is Weapon XV; Allgod the Living Religion is Weapon XVI; and Clayton Cortez is Weapon H, a Wolverine and Hulk (Amadeus Cho) hybrid. There are more, but those are the big names. There’s also a counter-program developed by S.H.I.E.L.D called Weapon Minus and they created Doctor Mindbubble, who is a direct counter to Weapon VII, Nuke. He’s on Super Soldier Serum and LSD, and no I’m not kidding.
If the MCU is smart, they’re going to say that Sam Sterns was the guy who helped continue the idea of the Weapons Plus program following Bruce Banner’s experiments turning him into the Hulk. It’s already established MCU cannon that Banner was working on a Super Soldier serum similar to the one that Erskine developed so they could continue making more enhanced soldiers for combat. Since that didn’t work out for Ross, they could say that he tapped Sterns in the aftermath of the attack on Harlem in The Incredible Hulk. This takes extra filming or effort, you simply state that Sterns didn’t know what he was working on, but Ross had titled the program Weapons Plus. Now you can explain several characters already in the MCU in terms of their relation to the Weapons Plus program.
You might ask how Project Wideawake is going to tie into all of this and that’s easily done through Adamantium and Ruth Bat-Seraph. While they didn’t call her a mutant in the film, they can easily change this in an upcoming film. They can say that they discovered a latent gene within her and this can be bolstered by an explanation from one of the Eternals giving the heroes the rundown on what the Celestials did when they came to Earth for the first time. If you’re uninitiated to that world, let me give you the TL;DR version of the Celestials, Eternals, Deviants, mutants, and humans.
The Celestials originally came to Earth and conducted an experiment when they arrived. They gathered a number of proto-humans and made four distinct categories and they made three distinct groups within the four. The First Host took the first grouping and made them into Homo-Immortalis AKA Eternals. It took the second group and made them into Homo-Descendus AKA Deviants. Then they took some of the humans and inserted a latent gene into them that causes “mutations,” the fourth group was left as is to serve as a control group for when the First Host came back to judge the Earth. This is how we get Eternals, Deviants, Mutants, and enhanced humans. That’s it. That’s the easy explanation.
By having someone like Sersi or Ikaris explain this to our heroes at the same time as we begin to see a proliferation of mutants, it also allows Marvel to “suddenly” introduce mutants into the MCU by using the explanation that the birth of the Celestial triggered the latent gene to go active. It’s really a rather elegant and simple solution to their upcoming problem. They can insert that Adamantium into the first human to begin showing signs of mutation and it just so happens to be a Canadian JTF2 member named James Howlett. This allows for older Wolverine to exist and allows Marvel to inject “new” mutants into the MCU that currently exists without having to explain that one version of Earth has one set of heroes while the other version has mutant heroes. I never liked that suggestion.
Within the development and proliferation of mutants suddenly becoming front and center, now you can have someone come along and start Project Wideawake to monitor this mutant growth and make sure it doesn’t lead to America being taken down from within. You take Ruth Bat-Seraph and have her head up the project and it leads to her meeting Henry Gyrich and Boliver Trask, which ultimately leads to the creation of Sentinels. All of this can come directly from Captain America: Brave New World and it takes a fun movie starring a new Cap and suddenly turns it into one of the most important films the MCU has made going forward and critical to understanding the Mutant Saga. Marvel gets a boost, Mackie gets a boost, and the new Cap film is now a tentpole rather than a fun one-off.
The way all of this can come to light is by having Betty convince Ross to make amends for his previous actions by telling the heroes about projects and precautions they would otherwise never have had the clearance to know. It allows a former adversary to ingratiate himself to his new hero colleagues and it moves several significant plotlines forward all with a simple push and a couple name drops. There is still plenty of time for Marvel to add some of this stuff in, but it might even already be in there. Who knows, maybe Val is the one in charge of Weapons Plus and Sentry is going to be an MCU Weapons Plus character. I truly wouldn’t mind that one bit either. They just need to get Weapons Plus and Project Wideawake going and Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* are the perfect vehicles to get this done.
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Kane Webb is an entertainment journalist for @BSO. He also analyzes film of the USC Trojans football team for TrojansWire and has been featured on @AthlonSports, @FanSided, @Scout, @Rivals, the Bakersfield Californian, Wisconsin State Journal, and much more. You can follow him on Twitter: @FightOnTwist
