Rumor Report: Will Evan Peters' Quicksilver Be On WandaVision?
Gather 'round the ol' rumor mill, everyone — it just spit out a doozy.
Multiple outlets have reported that Evan Peters, star of American Horror Story and the late, Fox-produced X-Men film series, has joined the cast of the Disney+ series WandaVision in an undisclosed role. We're guessing that, just based on that nugget of info, you just may be able to guess what the rumor of the day is: that he'll be portraying the speedster Quicksilver, the part he played in X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix.
Just in case you need a brief refresher: before Disney unhinged its jaw and swallowed up Fox Studios, the latter held the film rights to the X-Men and their related characters, which it parlayed into a very successful — if hit-or-miss in quality — series of movies beginning with X-Men in 2000 and ending with Dark Phoenix last year. However, the character of Quicksilver (whose real name is Peter or Pietro Maximoff, depending on the telling) has been so closely associated in Marvel Comics with both the X-Men and the Avengers that Fox and Marvel Studios could basically lay claim to him equally.
As a result, we got two cinematic versions of the character within about a year. Evan Peters' version, Peter Maximoff, debuted in Days of Future Past in 2014, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe rolled out its version — Pietro Maximoff, the twin brother of Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch — in 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron, portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Peters' version was arguably more well-received, thanks to an ingenious sequence showcasing his powers in Days of Future Past and the fact that Johnson's version was killed off in rather unceremonious fashion in his first and only film appearance. This, coupled with the fact that WandaVision is centered firmly on Quicksilver's reality-warping sister, is what likely what has that rumor mill firing on all cylinders at the moment.
It would make a lot more sense for the MCU version of Quicksilver to return
So, what do we make of this rumor? On its surface, it's interesting. What little we've seen of WandaVision has suggested strongly that Wanda's ability to bend reality to her will is going to figure heavily into the events of the series, and although the death of her brother has barely been mentioned in the MCU since it happened, we're just going to assume that it traumatized her a bit. Since Paul Bettany's Vision (who was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and not blipped back in Endgame) will also be part of the proceedings, we know that it matters little whether a character is technically still among the living — there's still a chance that they could pop up on the show.
Could it be that Wanda, in an attempt to get her brother back, ends up reaching into a parallel reality — the one in which the X-Men movies took place — and grabbing the wrong one? Perhaps, but it seems like that would be more of a one-off gag than a major plot point, and we're of the opinion that you don't cast Evan Peters to take part in a one-off gag. We find it much more likely that he'll be playing a completely different character. If anything, his presence could serve as a sort of inside joke for fans in the know.
For our money, it's more likely that Aaron Taylor-Johnson will return to reprise a role that many fans felt was given short shrift in the MCU — but if that's happening, it's being kept tightly under wraps. Mighty Marvel is pretty darned good at keeping plot details close to the vest, so we don't expect all to become clear until WandaVision makes it debut on Disney+. As of this writing, that is still expected to happen in December 2020.