Credit: Inside the MagicElizabeth Olsen is ready to come back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe— on one specific condition.
Although Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) did not debut in the MCU until Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), she has become one of the most significant figures in the franchise and, arguably, the character with the single most tragic trajectory.
Initially presented alongside brother Pietro Maximoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as an antagonist with a suspiciously vague accent to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Wanda quickly became a full-blown superhero.
However, she couldn’t even make it through Captain America: Civil War (2016) without being a figure of fear and violence due to accidentally blowing up a Wakandan embassy.
The two-part Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Endgame saw her slowly being hollowed out by a series of horrific events, including having to painfully destroy her partner Vision (Paul Bettany) to no end. By the time she starred in WandaVision on Disney+, investigating the Scarlet Witch’s trauma was a full-time job.
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Elizabeth Olsen’s most recent (live-action, we won’t count animated alternate universe zombie Wanda) appearance in the MCU was in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
At that point, she had become a full-on cosmic villain, willing to murder John Krasinski just to make a point about how much everything had sucked for her; to be fair, Krasinski was being kind of a jerk about things over on Earth-838.
The ultimate fate of the Scarlet Witch at the end of that movie is unknown and Kevin Feige has been pretty coy about the whole thing. In all likelihood, that’s because the Marvel chief wanted to keep Wanda Maximoff as a trump card to pull out in a future installment of the franchise.
For her part, Elizabeth Olsen has seemed iffy about returning as the Scarlet Witch, telling Times of London in 2023, “Specifically in the last four years, my output has been Marvel… I just need other characters in my life. There’s no longevity in one character.”
Things seem to have changed for Elizabeth Olsen a little bit in the last year because she is now saying that she would gladly return to Marvel as long as there was a good narrative reason.
In an FM104 interview alongside His Three Daughters (2023) and Marvel co-star Carrie Coon, Olsen said, “[Scarlet Witch is] a character that I love going back to when there’s a way to use her well, and I think I have been lucky that when I started, I was used well. I think people didn’t know what to do with me for a second there… if there’s a good way to use her, I’m always happy to come back.”
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Marvel Studios has been increasingly using WandaVision as a launchpad for new series and plot points in the greater MCU, including the introduction of Monica Rambeau/Photon (Teyonah Parris), who starred in The Marvels (2023), and the upcoming series Agatha All Along, starring Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness, and the untitled project starring Paul Bettany as the White Vision.
If things once again somehow get derailed for the MCU before Secret Wars, we won’t be all that surprised to see the return of Wanda Maximoff. It sounds like she’s on board.
Do you want to see Scarlet Witch return to the MCU?