The MCU Book That Hints At Wanda's Mutant Powers In WandaVision
"She may be called Scarlet Witch, but Wanda's powers aren't derived from the occult. Whether it altered her or merely unlocked something latent inside Wanda, the Infinity Stone on Loki's Scepter bestowed incredible powers of the mind."
That's a quote from the pages of The Marvel Cinematic Universe Visual Dictionary, the 2018 book that's enjoying some nerd love thanks to a couple of recent events in the MCU. The big one was the premiere of WandaVision, the first entry in a slate of Disney+ streaming programs based on the Marvel Comics stable of characters. In it, we see Wanda Maximoff, already one of the films' most difficult heroes to get a read on, displaying a bevy of puzzling abilities. Considering that she spent most of the movies moving things with her brain and occasionally giving people bad dreams, her newfound capacity to make storks exist and bring decorative insects to life feels a little perplexing.
More than that, the genesis of Wanda's powers in the MCU has always come off as a little sketchy. We know that Hydra's own Baron Strucker dropped a fat sack of evil science on her courtesy of the Mind Stone, but the hows and whys of the process are left murky. Now, with WandaVision shining a spotlight on the stoic Sokovian, fans are revisiting the particulars of the Visual Dictionary, and one part of the book's description of Wanda has fans squealing with excitement.
Is the MCU going back to Wanda's comic book origins?
Re-read that segment from the book and you'll notice something peculiar. Despite being Marvel's definitive treatise on its characters, it gets notably wishy-washy as to whether Wanda received her powers from the Mind Stone, or if it merely brought powers that were already present to the surface, "unlocking the goddess within" like a fresh bar of Hydra Soak.
This is all made even more compelling when you think about the Scarlet Witch's place in the MCU. When she was first introduced in the post-credits sequence at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, her original comic book origins were a designated no-fly zone for Disney, given that she started out as a mutant and Fox owned the rights to that particular brand of genetic weirdery. The low-key implication made in The Marvel Cinematic Universe Visual Dictionary seems to be that Wanda, on the down low, may have been a double-secret mutant all along, and that the studio was sitting on that detail until the time was right.
With Disney's acquisition of Fox's entertainment properties came the rights to all of the X-Men, women, and so on, so it's possible that we'll be hearing the word "mutant" in-universe sooner rather than later. Nobody's talking so far, but it could well be that Wanda's real source of power is headed for the screen double quick, and that Marvel Studios has been hinting at it for years.