How The Falcon And The Winter Soldier Could Introduce The X-Men Into The MCU
First off, let's try and keep our cool. We've all been hoping for mutants in the MCU for a long time now. We've even had an X-Man callously held out in front of us and then snatched away by one heartless, unnamed party already this year. Emotions are high. Nobody wants to get hurt again — but in case you do, know that there's an argument to be made that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has already laid the groundwork for the debut of mutants in the MCU. Maybe.
This theorizing starts with the show's second episode, and the introduction of a character named Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly). To the uninitiated, he is the elderly man who Bucky (Sebastian Stan) brings Sam (Anthony Mackie) to meet, who then suddenly proves himself capable of throwing stuff so hard that it gets embedded three inches into the drywall. But there's more to his story than that: In the comics, Bradley's abilities came about as a remarkably dark, and deeply allegorical, offshoot of a much bigger program, branded Weapon Plus.
In the comics, Weapon Plus was a multinational effort to create the soldier of the future. One of their early victories was a bright-eyed patriot — and volunteer lab rat — who they labeled Weapon I, but who is more recognized today by his public moniker, Captain America. Isaiah Bradley, meanwhile, was another man experimented on during the Weapon I initiative — and his introduction to the MCU means that here, as in the source material, the clandestine super-soldier project didn't stop at Steve Rogers.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is just nine 'Weapons' away from the X-Men
Following Weapon I, the years pressed on and the Weapon Plus program continued. The results were hit and miss — Weapon II was a squirrel with a metal skeleton, whereas the Weapon VI experimentation, led by Dr. Noah Burstein, was what gave Luke Cage his famous strength and bulletproof skin. And then, there was the Weapon X project, which comic fans know resulted in a certain adamantium-clawed mutant.
To be clear, the term "Weapon X" was already a familiar name to comic book fans when writer Grant Morrison painted over it with a loving coat of retcon in his New X-Men series in the early 2000s, revealing that the X wasn't just catchy nineties overuse of a totally radical letter of the alphabet, it was actually the Roman numeral for "10." Wolverine, the comics revealed, was just one of a much larger collection of government sanctioned test subjects, going all the way back to Weapon I's use of Steve Rogers, followed by the experiments which the project then performed upon 300 Black American soldiers, a massacre of which Isaiah Bradley would be the lone survivor.
Basically, the experimentation that occurred to Logan is just the evolution of the process that created Captain America. So, could The Falcon and the Winter Soldier plant the seeds that will eventually lead to Wolverine's introduction in the MCU? The pieces are certainly in place, yes.