‘The Marvels’: Two Major Cameos Introduce [SPOILER] to the MCU

SPOILER alert: This post contains major spoilers about the ending of “The Marvels,” now playing in theaters.

At this point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the multiverse is in shambles.

By the end of “The Marvels,” the villain has ripped a massive hole into the fabric of space and time, causing another reality to start bleeding into the MCU. To repair it, the titular superheroes — Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson); Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani); and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris)— must merge their powers and then send Monica beyond the rip into the other dimension. To complete the task, however, Monica has to stay behind, trapping her in another universe while Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan mourn her sacrifice.

In the post-credits scene, we see that Monica is alive and well as she wakes up in a strange medical facility. Suddenly, she comes face to face with an alternate version of her late mother, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), by her side. The Maria from this universe doesn’t recognize Monica, and she’s dressed in the red-and-white Binary costume from the comics. In the Marvel comics, Binary is a powerful alter-ego of Carol Danvers while she teamed up with the X-Men.

Speaking of the X-Men, the biggest shocker of “The Marvels” immediately follows when Kelsey Grammer shows up as Dr. Hank McCoy, aka Beast — the hairy, blue mutant Grammer first played in 2006’s “X-Men: The Last Stand.” (The character was played as a young man by Nicholas Hoult in several “X-Men” films starting with 2011’s “X-Men: First Class,” and Grammer reprised the role briefly in 2014’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past.”) Beast’s appearance marks the second “X-Men” crossover into the MCU, following Patrick Stewart’s cameo as Prof. Charles Xavier in last year’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” In “The Marvels,” Beast name-drops Charles and concludes that Monica is from another reality parallel to their own. Monica is now seemingly trapped in a universe where the X-Men exist, though it’s unclear if it’s the same world as any of Fox’s “X-Men” movies.

The second surprise cameo occurs at the end of the film, before the credits have even rolled, between Ms. Marvel and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series “Hawkeye.” Ms. Marvel hilariously recreates the iconic scene at the end of 2008’s “Iron Man,” when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) recruits Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) for the Avengers Initiative. Suddenly appearing in the shadows, just as Fury did, Ms. Marvel invites the young Hawkeye to join a larger team. She also mentions Ant-Man’s daughter, Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton) — who appeared in this year’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” — as another potential member, suggesting that the Young Avengers from the comics is finally coming to fruition.

Many Marvel fans have predicted the formation of the Young Avengers, due to the number of teen heroes introduced in previous movies. In the comics, Bishop and Lang are early members of the team. There are several characters from the MCU who seem like prime candidates for the Young Avengers, like America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez from “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”), Ironheart (Dominique Thorne from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), Elijah Bradley (Elijah Richardson from “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”) and older versions of Billy and Tommy Maximoff (first played by Julian Hilliard and Jett Klyne in “WandaVision”).

With these teases, it appears the MCU is shaping up two of its next major storylines and teams. With the main Avengers not assembling since “Endgame,” the Young Avengers would be a youthful successor, and ever since the Disney-Fox acquisition, fans have been clamoring for the X-Men. Beast’s cameo is just the second X-Men character to cross over to the MCU, but one major step toward the mutants’ grand welcome.