The following contains spoilers for WandaVision episode 5.
“You didn’t see that coming?” The Marvel Cinematic Universe received one of its all-time biggest surprises in the closing moments of WandaVision’s fifth episode. Though plenty of fans were awaiting a showstopping cameo, it’s hard to imagine anyone expecting just who was on the other side of Vis and Wanda’s front door: Pietro Maximoff, Wanda’s pseudo-speedster brother who was tragically gunned down during the Battle of Sokovia in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, appears miraculously alive and well.
But there’s something about Pietro that doesn’t match up with the person last seen six years ago. He looks different, he sounds different, and his entire demeanor is completely unlike any behavior demonstrated in Age of Ultron. And yet, for the many Marvel superfans who stayed up late Thursday night/early Friday morning to watch “On a Very Special Episode…” as soon as it was available, his appearance set their hype (and Twitter feeds) ablaze. The implications surrounding this moment are both intensely exciting for anyone in the know… and profoundly confusing to anyone who isn’t. Is this really Pietro?
In the last few minutes of WandaVision‘s fifth episode, as the titular couple quarrels over Wanda’s (alleged) unethical treatment of Westview’s citizens, a familiar face stops by the house to clear the tension, framed in a way that is designed to be a surprise for both audiences in the real world and the members of S.W.O.R.D. watching the goings-on through their CRT TVs. But this is clearly not the same Pietro once kept in captivity within Baron Wolfgang von Strucker’s lab – above any other differences, he’s not played by actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He’s instead portrayed by Evan Peters, an inconsistency so glaring, even Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis notices it: “she recast Pietro?”
Given WandaVision’s general premise, it’s a practice that makes sense within the show’s context: actors get recast in sitcoms sometimes, so in this literalized sitcom world, characters can too. In fact, recasting is a familiar practice in the MCU, as Don Cheadle took over for Terrance Howard as Colonel James Rhodes from 2010’s Iron Man 2 onwards, among other examples. But like a lot of the goings-on in WandaVision, the smaller details make all the difference.
What makes this recasting so specifically shocking ties into the history of not just Marvel Studios, but the entirety of Marvel comics cinema. Quicksilver is one of the only comic book characters ever brought to life by two different actors in two concurrently-running superhero movie mega-franchises: while Aaron Taylor-Johnson played Quicksilver in Age of Ultron, he was portrayed by Evan Peters in the X-Men film series, including 2014’s Days of Future Past, 2016’s Apocalypse, and 2019’s Dark Phoenix.
The significance of this Pietro Maximoff anomaly may be difficult to interpret for anyone not neck-deep in the history of superhero cinema: Decades ago, in an effort to save itself from bankruptcy in the 1990s, Marvel Entertainment sold the movie rights to many of its properties to major studios, including 20th Century Fox. The studio optioned the rights to make movies based on the X-Men, along with the entirety of characters within the “mutant-kind” community, including Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, the mutant offspring of X-Men mainstay Magneto (a kernel of canonicity briefly addressed in the X-Men films).
However, the Maximoff twins have also been major players in the rotating lineup of Avengers, which means that, through a litany of legal loopholes, Marvel Studios could technically bring them to the MCU as long as they weren’t addressed as mutants or the children of Magneto – and that’s precisely what the studio did.
Upon the death of Taylor-Johnson’s Pietro in Age of Ultron, the scale was perfectly balanced, as all things should be: Wanda remained an MCU regular and Peters’ Pietro became a fan-favorite in the twilight years of the X-Men saga, independent of each other. This studio stalemate between Marvel Studios and 20th Century Fox ended when the Walt Disney Company acquired the latter in 2019, thereby reverting the X-Men movie rights to Marvel Studios, another Disney subsidiary.
This bizarre piece of Hollywood history is why the closing confrontation in “On a Very Special Episode…” is so shocking. This is not simply recasting a long-dead character, this is an active acknowledgment of the X-Men film series and its (deeply convoluted) continuity. In the years following the Fox buyout, Marvel fans have generally assumed the X-Men would be rebooted into the MCU with an entirely new cast and storyline, given the original series ended on a whimper with the poorly-received Dark Phoenix. Peters’ Pietro appearing at the end of the episode, treated as a different character within the universe, changes the conversation entirely.
For over a year, WandaVision has been publicly poised as the setup for 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Given the film’s title, its ties to WandaVision, and its inclusion of Wanda as a member of the cast, this appearance of an alternate Pietro suggests the X-Men universe is a lot closer to the MCU than previously foreseen. Additionally, Multiverse of Madness reportedly connects to the third Spider-Man MCU film, set to release in December. If the swirling rumors of Spider-Verse shenanigans and the confirmed appearance of previous Spider-Man movie villains are to be believed, Pietro’s alternate-universe arrival is the start of a new and never-before-attempted practice in cinematic genre fiction.
It’s fascinating to consider that the moment the “Marvel Cinematic Multiverse” opened up did not involve Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, or any of the other A-listers so prominent to the biggest movie franchise of all time. Instead, this monumental moment belongs to a pair of estranged siblings, treated as superpowered pawns in a petty legal game between two rivaling studios, now long over. Whether this appearance means the entirety of the X-Men film canon will be integrated into the MCU is anyone’s guess, but it blows the door wide open on what was once believed impossible. With just a knock on the door, Marvel Studios proved that, even without those rainbow-colored stones, the possibilities remain infinite.
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