How will Marvel Studios tell a fresh new X-men story while staying relevant to the civil rights movement? Artwork adapted from Jim Lee’s classic 80's X-men run in tribute to Kevin Feige.

Magneto’s Tattoo

Why It Is So Crucial That Magneto Be A Holocaust Survivor

Very soon, Fox Studios will become a part of the Disney corporation and for some reason, the thing that most concerns me during this merger is how the next iteration of the X-men character Magneto will appear to future generations. He has already been portrayed in a half dozen films made by Fox since 2000, yet in the coming years, he and the rest of the X-men characters will be introduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe(MCU) and be depicted true to their source material for the first time. Just one major hurdle lies in the way and it all comes down to Magneto and his connection to a war that concluded over seventy years ago. How Marvel handles this issue in these coming films may be critical to our identity as a society. Magneto’s salvation and our own may lay in a subtle change to his friendship with Charles Xavier, AKA Professor X.

Just in case you haven’t been following for the past 37 years, let me bring you up to date. Magneto is the would-be villain of the X-men, but he is a villain we sympathize with. On his forearm, from his time spent as a child in a Nazi concentration camp, is a tattooed serial number. This mark is a reminder of the character’s driving force leading him to become a figurehead to disenfranchised mutants. Magneto well understands the dangers of bigotry and persecution having seen it all before. He is an anti-villain in Marvel Comics’ least subtle social commentary on the civil rights movement.

Marvel Comics have notoriously themed their stories around social justice for decades. Stan Lee’s “Soapbox”, found at the end of each of his books, left no ambiguity on where he stood on many issues. Admittedly, Marvel’s record hasn’t always been stellar. They have definitely had moments that I look back on as questionable. Whether making the only martial arts superhero, Iron Fist, a blond haired, blue eyed westerner was more racist or less racist than if they had made him Asian is beyond me. But overall, by making stories that are about the people behind the heroes more than their alter-egos, Marvel has explored a world of societal woes, especially through the bigotry exhibited to the mutant X-men.

X-Men by Fox Studios, 2000 - Magneto portrayed by Ian McKellen

You may be wondering why I am making all of this fuss about a set of characters whose stories have been told over the course of ten films and two separate iterations of casting. But, as anyone who has read the X-men knows, we have yet to see these stories adapted to anything accurate to the source material. Mostly the inconsistencies are the fault of an earlier, less earnest era of comic book hero movies. But thanks to the coming merger, we will soon have an inevitable rebooting of the X-men franchise.

Fox has not entirely failed at telling the tale of the X-men. They have even gone so far as to set a scene in Auschwitz and centered one of their films around Magneto’s vendetta against Nazis. Yet when Disney acquires the X-men and gives them back to Marvel Studios, those Fox movies are done, the slate is being wiped clean so that the Fox film timeline isn’t even history. Soon we will meet the X-men again, for the first time. Their stories can finally be told except one specific detail about Magneto and how he fits into the MCU.

The MCU has already been underway for over ten years and has a continuity of 20 films showing no sign of mutants existing. Marvel is now faced with finding a way of telling a fresh new X-men movie where we all believe that Magneto and Professor X have been in the MCU all along. It doesn’t seem likely that the MCU will reboot its own timeline to accommodate the X-men. Especially since this is something that has already been done in Fox’s first reboot of the X-men movies in 2011. To integrate the X-men into the MCU, which happens in the present day, we are going to either see an eighty-something-year-old Magneto, or a Magneto that has become divorced from his pivotal backstory. This latter option is tantamount to holocaust denial. (Hyperbole, I know)

I must confess, Magneto’s situation isn’t the first time I have found myself perplexed over the depiction of one of these comic book characters. It bothered me to no end when Spider-Man was not originally included in the MCU for its first nine years. I kept looking at the Avengers and wondering about the world that would have been had my favorite web-slinger been included in this ultimate team-up. And yet, when he was finally added into the series it made so much sense to me why we had to wait for Spider-Man. To introduce a teenage superhero dealing with teenage problems, we would first need to create a world full of superheroes for that kid to grow up admiring. The whole situation that worried me so much turned out to be, in the words of Bob Ross, “a happy accident”. The MCU Peter Parker and his relationship to his world is one of my favorite iterations of these characters and their dynamics to date. And yet still, I worry about Magneto. His fate somehow seems more critical. Will he be in his eighties? And what then becomes of Professor Charles Xavier?

Xavier and Magneto portrayed Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen

Magneto’s relationship with Charles has always been a peculiar one. They are longtime friends turned enemies, peers in the mutant civil rights movement who fundamentally disagree on methodology. You might say that their philosophies differ in a similar way to the philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. One believes in peaceful integration, the other is too angry for such an option. These stories are not at all thinly veiled analogies and retelling them is important in defining who we are.

This is a peculiar time we are living in. While the voices of the disenfranchised have become louder than they ever could have been before the internet, the voices of those who feel offended by any cries for justice are just as loud. It is an important time for Marvel to finally have this platform to tell their stories. The kind of X-men that we pass down to our children to remember matters.

I believe this seemingly complex problem has a simple solution. It can all be made right by making Magneto an elder and mentor to Professor X. Imagine if you will, that for decades Magneto has encouraged a philosophy of silence and separatism, hence we have yet to hear about the X-men before now. Then, as Professor X wants to found his school for the gifted and begin advocating for mutants, the mentor and student become divided. When Professor X begins having an effect on the world that is not always for the mutant’s benefit, Magneto’s philosophy of separation no longer holds and he becomes militant as a result. Or at least that is just one way that we can have our cake and eat it too. Gosh, I hope Marvel’s Producer, Kevin Feige sees it this way. Magneto matters now more than ever.