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For everything, there is a season: A time to live, and a time to get crushed by a mountain. No one knows this better than Wanda Maximoff, the villain-then-hero-then-villain-again MCU powerhouse who was once aptly described by Maria Hill as “weird.”
Yes, the Scarlet Witch is dead, squished under stuff like so many witches before her. But any real Marvel fan knows that a Wanda Maximoff story isn’t over – not really over – until she’s waffled back and forth between sadistic, maternal lunacy and nigh-omnipotent altruism seven or eighteen times. It’d be wasteful to dump Elizabeth Olsen’s Sokovian wildcard from the franchise just because she got turned into a fine burgundy paste. Here are five ways that she could come back.
The Darkhold
When in doubt, magic. It’s one of the few storytelling devices that you don’t owe anyone an explanation for. How did Wanda come back to life? Magic. Isn’t that a little much? It was serious magic. Serious Darkhold magic. Or, you know. If the Darkhold can’t do it, they find a Super Darkhold. There will probably be repercussions. It’ll probably take years of movies and streaming series just to sort it all out. Remember how Peter Parker erased his whole identity from the entire world? Or how Doctor Strange had a Fantasia fight with another Doctor Strange? Or how Wong broke Abomination out of a high-security prison so that they could have a tickle fight for money?
Magic. It’s a narrative utility player.
Multiversal Wanda
If you’re very old and can remember all the way back to 2015, you might recall that there were some shenanigans surrounding Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. Both characters had spent time as Avengers, so they could technically be used by Disney, but Fox held the rights to X-Men characters, which the Maximoffs also definitely were. They made their own Quicksilver, and alluded to their own Scarlet Witch, a year before Age of Ultron.
We’ve already seen characters from Fox’s deeply confusing X-Men universe start to leak into the MCU. A Patrick Stewart-y Charles Xavier made the commute in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and a cameo in 2023’s The Marvels had audiences scrambling eggs all over their tossed salads. It wouldn’t be a stretch to bring an as-yet unseen, more X-Men-centric Wanda into the fold from the Fox continuity – maybe one who, like Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, isn’t ashamed to admit that she’s 50% Magneto.
Vision
Tom King’s Vision series was the highwater mark for comic book storytelling until the next Tom King story came out. It’s a 12-issue episodic tale about Vision trying to build a family for himself, using chunks of Wanda’s recorded brainwaves to make a wife named Virginia.
Parts of the story were already co-opted for WandaVision, like the ill-fated family dog named Sparky and the age-old android “toaster” epithet. What they didn’t use could make for a perfect follow-up to WandaVision: A show where Vision creates his own Westview-style family, this time with science instead of magic. A synthezoid family, made by a version of one of Earth’s mightiest heroes, removed from his humanity and trying to recreate it piecemeal. It’s a Michael Crichton novel waiting to be written.
Moon Knight team-up
Phase Four of the MCU was certainly a rocky ride, and it felt like the studio took a lot of shots without super-duper knowing what they were aiming at. It wasn’t always a bad thing – Moon Knight was, overall, an unexpected shot of weird fun, even if it hasn’t led to, you know. Anything. Anything else at all.
If the good folks at Disney decided that they wanted to incorporate Moon Knight into the larger MCU, there’s a great opportunity with Wanda Maximoff. If the Avengers need her back, there’s a guy who’s already navigated the other side of death. Using Moon Knight would be a great way to resurrect Scarlet Witch, and watching her stomp Khonshu when he demands something in return would be an even better way to prove that she hasn’t lost a step.
Rescued by her awful kids
Imagine the scene: Wanda opens her eyes for the first time since the end of Multiverse of Madness. Everything is blurry at first. She gets her bearings.
She’s still in the cave on Mount Wundagore. Her son Billy, now slightly older, beckons her back to the world of the living using his now-realized magic powers. Her other son, Tommy, runs in circles at super speed, lifting the stones that once buried his mother high in the air with the force of his motion. “What is this?” Wanda asks.
“We did this, mother,” says Billy. “We brought you back. We want to sing you another song about ice cream.”
Wanda stares for a moment. The horror sets in. She reaches out with tendrils of magical energy and collapses the cave on top of all three of them.