Marvel Studios hasn’t yet announced any plans to actually give the X-Men their own Marvel Cinematic Universe movie — and even if the company announced one tomorrow, the production pipeline means it wouldn’t come out before 2027 or ’28 at the earliest. But that certainly hasn’t stopped the creative minds behind MCU movies from playing around in the borders of X-Men continuity, and Captain America: Brave New World is no exception.
Brave New World not only introduces a major pillar of the X-Men setting — adamantium, a metal that can cut through (almost) anything — it introduces it in a way that creates a foundation for a whole subcategory of X-Men characters. It’s subtle! It’s deft! It’s interesting! I definitely only noticed it because I’m a giant nerd!
And it would be great if I believed it was going anywhere.
Much of Brave New World’s plot revolves around the discovery that the Celestial corpse from Eternals, frozen mid-emergence in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is full of adamantium. The metal itself is just a name-drop in Brave New World: Its properties are never really unpacked or demonstrated. It’s just described as a metal that rivals vibranium for indestructibility. Its value is that vibranium is 99% controlled by a single, isolationist, highly secure nation that isn’t interested in sharing, while the motherlode of adamantium is just standing around in an awkward pose in an area of the world many nations could potentially access.
Photo: Eli Adé/Marvel Studios
Brave New World gets deeper into X-Men lore, however, in centering Japan as the face of the other nations competing with the American government to claim all that adamantium. There are any number of logical, real-world reasons Japan might play this role in this film, from basic geopolitics to more metatextual moviemaking concerns. But Japan as a country is also inextricably interwoven with X-Men continuity, particularly where Wolverine is concerned.
Superhero comics are a hodgepodge of everything pop culture thinks is pretty cool, all rolled up in long-lived, interconnected universes. So suffice to say, between U.S. audiences’ long-standing interest in Japanese pop culture and the trappings thereof, and the personal predilections key X-Men creators like Chris Claremont and Frank Miller have for samurai- and ninja-inflected adventures, the X-Men were gonna get linked up with Japan in some way.
But also, sometimes, the timing of a general media fad — like the Kung Fu Craze of the 1970s and 1980s — coincides with a creatively fertile period in a single genre, like X-Men comics during that same time. So thanks to the ongoing and connected nature of superhero comics, Wolverine wound up as a century-old Canadian lone wolf who nevertheless spent so much dang time in Japan that we’d need a chart to keep track of his Japanese ex-girlfriends, fiancées, baby mamas, and sworn enemies.
And with so many Japanese characters in Marvel Comics linked up to Wolverine, Japan itself became linked up with the metal on his bones, through characters like Lady Deathstrike or Daken — because one of the only things Wolverine’s adamantium claws can’t cut through is more adamantium. After all, you can only invent a magical adamantium-stopping katana so many times.
It would be nice to be able to say that this is exactly the kind of dense world-building background available for superhero adaptations to exploit, the kind that makes a world feel lived-in and real. The kind that would make us all go “Aha! How clever!” when the MCU eventually reveals that, thanks to Japan taking point on adamantium mining in Brave New World, it winds up with a roster of home-grown adamantium-using superheroes.
Image: 20th Century Studios, Marvel Studios
But that would require Marvel Studios to do anything with the X-Men before the events of Brave New World are as diminished in its fans’ minds as the events of Eternals are now. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if that deft, clever, interesting foundation for future X-Men lore is followed up on, if follow-up doesn’t show up.
Marvel Studios will undoubtedly eventually stop making feints at putting the X-Men on screen and make a full MCU X-Men movie. But with the upcoming blockbuster Avengers: Secret Wars named after a story arc that’s about restarting the Marvel Universe, will today’s X-Men references have anything to do with tomorrow’s X-Men continuity?
Until Marvel sets an X-Men movie in the main continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, all the X-Men winks currently piling up — in Brave New World, as well as in Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, and Doctor Strange — aren’t X-Men world-building at all. It’s just artificial X-Men flavoring.