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After Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is at a crossing point. Avengers: Endgame marked the end of over a decade of Marvel movies, but it isn’t an end to the MCU.

Marvel is now in a rebuilding phase, where it will take superheroes like Black Panther and Captain Marvel and use them to set up a new, epic storyline. On top of that, after Disney bought Fox, the X-Men franchise is coming home to Marvel, and now Marvel has a chance to introduce the X-Men into the MCU.

Many fans are wondering how Marvel plans on doing that, but one theory is for sure, it’s definitely not because of Loki.

What a Reddit fan theory said

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWqY49i6c74

A fan on Reddit came up with a theory that, since Loki can travel back in time, Marvel will use that as a way of explaining why the X-Men didn’t exist in the early MCU movies, but will exist in the future MCU movies. This would fix a massive issue with having the X-Men join the MCU, like the X-Men, in the comics at least, are very open and public about their activities. But obviously, they’re currently nowhere to be seen in the MCU.

That fan said that it’s possible that Loki will travel back in time and kill Professor X, which would force the mutants to go into hiding. Then, the Time Variance Authority, which are basically time cops, will discover this and fix it, thus changing the future. However, as other Marvel fans said, this is impossible.

Why this won’t work

Time travel in movies is always going to be weird, but how the MCU explains time travel is somewhat simple. Basically, the Marvel movies are in one timeline, let’s call it Timeline A.

The Avengers in Avengers: Endgame used Ant-Man’s time machine to go back in time to borrow some infinity stones, but when they did that, they created multiple new timelines that are different from Timeline A. 

The whole point of having Captain America go back in time to return the infinity stones that they had borrowed was to make things right in those other timelines. That’s because, in the MCU, when you go into the past and change something, you don’t change the future of Timeline A, you just create a new timeline instead.

That’s exactly why Loki, even though he definitely will time travel in his Disney+ show, won’t be why the X-Men joins the MCU.

If Loki had killed Professor X in the past, and if the time cops fixed this later on, then both of these actions will create a new timeline instead of affecting things in Timeline A, the timeline that actually matters for fans. That said, as other fans mentioned, this explanation is technically possible, it’s just such a lazy and bad explanation that Marvel probably won’t go down this route.

How Marvel may introduce the X-Men

Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique in the X-Men
American actress Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, aka Mystique in a scene from the film ‘X-Men: First Class’ | Murray Close/Getty Images

There are many ways that Marvel can introduce the X-Men into the movies, and Marvel is in no rush to do so. Marvel has shown that it’s willing to take years to tell a story, so it has plenty of time to figure out exactly how to introduce the X-Men into the movies.

For example, while Magneto’s backstory is linked to World War 2 and the Holocaust, Marvel doesn’t necessarily need to go word for word in adapting the backstories of Magneto and other X-Men characters. Marvel has changed a superhero’s backstory before. 

Alternatively, one fan posted a theory that Marvel’s upcoming movie, The Eternals, will be linked to the X-Men. This fan theory said that The Eternals experimented on humans in the past and gave some of them the gene that causes them to become mutants. When Thanos snapped his fingers, those genes were activated. That said, this is just a fan theory, and anything is possible right now.

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