Captain America 4 Is Sneakily Setting Up A Major X-Men Connection
Brave New World director Julius Onah talks bringing adamantium into the MCU.
When Eternals premiered in 2021, the emergence of Tiamut in its climax felt like a big deal. The Marvel film revealed that a dormant celestial had been slumbering within the Earth for thousands of years, and positioned his awakening as another direct threat to our planet. The Eternals managed to stop Tiamut from breaking out of his cocoon, but his frozen body, looming somewhere in the Indian Ocean, was never disposed of.
Tiamut has haunted the MCU’s margins ever since. Despite the Celestial’s potential to mix up future Marvel stories, he’s scarcely been mentioned outside Eternals. That odd state of affairs is finally set to change in the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, which will bring us back to “Tiamut Island” for the first time in almost four years. Writer and director Julius Onah seems keen to make up for lost time, as Tiamut plays a crucial role in the film while also boasting a connection to a fan-favorite X-Men character.
“Tiamut Island” will finally play a role in the MCU — and the future of the X-Men.
In Brave New World, Tiamut is made relevant thanks to the new natural resource it offers the world: adamantium. New U.S. President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) wants to horde it, which could spark a conflict over the precious metal. In an interview with ScreenRant, Onah compared the importance of adamantium to vibranium, explaining that the former has even more capacity to reshape the MCU.
“Adamantium now becomes this resource that could change the world in a way that’s very different [from] Vibranium,” Onah said. “It becomes an amazing geopolitical football in our film.”
Unlike vibranium, which is found only in Wakanda, Tiamut’s adamantium belongs to no nation in particular... yet. That creates an interesting parallel to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in which multiple nations fought to get some vibranium.
Adamantium will eventually find its way to the MCU’s Wolverine.
More than that, Brave New World is also setting the stage for Marvel’s highly-anticipated X-Men reboot. Adamantium is most closely associated with Wolverine, who has the metal grafted onto his skeleton. “Adamantium, as we know, will eventually be a part of Project X,” Onah said. “It will eventually be a part of the story of Wolverine.”
Wolverine likely won’t appear in Brave New World, but the very presence of adamantium means his MCU debut could be just around the corner. Onah, at least, seemed to have fun reinterpreting such an iconic part of X-Men lore:
“What’s so great about the MCU is it’s an opportunity to take things that are iconic from publishing and find a way to reimagine them for this universe in a way that could be really exciting. And because we haven’t had mutants in the past, because we haven’t had Adamantium, it became such a fun way to surprise audiences with a new sort of vision of what it could be.”
There’s already a lot to look forward to in Brave New World, but Onah relished the opportunity to kickstart a new Marvel era. “I’m just still pinching myself that I get to have the movie that introduces Red Hulk, that introduces Adamantium, that introduces Serpent Society,” Onah said. “It is fun for me as a geek, and I think it’s going to be a blast for all audiences when they go see this movie.”
