Captain America: Brave New World Teaser Could Confirm Longtime X-Men Rumors

Chloé Zhao's 2021 Marvel flick "Eternals" had a fascinating premise for a superhero movie. The title heroes were un-aging, superpowered immortals who were placed on Earth by an ineffable space deity — Arishem the Celestial — thousands of years ago. Their job was to protect humanity from eerie monsters called Deviants, assuring that Earth's population of Homo sapiens continues to grow for millennia. Once the population has reached a certain point, the life energy on Earth's surface will activate a godlike zygote gestating deep within the planet's core. The baby Celestial will then "hatch" out of the Earth, destroying the planet, and take its place among its divine brethren as a creator of thousands of new worlds. 

The Eternals are unaware of the consequences of their mission, and don't like that humanity has to die for a Celestial to be born. As such, the Eternals chose to break their programming, defy Arishem, and cease the new Celestial from hatching. At the end of the movie, the new Celestial, Tiamut, was left dead, having been turned to stone. The Eternals walked away, seeking a new identity for themselves.

Disappointingly, none of the subsequent films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have bothered to address the fact that a massive stone god is now resting, semi-emerged from the ocean. Surely that's a momentous enough event for, say, Ant-Man to comment on, right?

The new teaser trailer for Julius Onah's upcoming film "Captain America: Brave New World" finally, at long last, acknowledges that Tiamut still exists. It's only seen briefly in the background of one shot, but Tiamut is real. 

Tiamut's inclusion in "Brave New World," however, has sparked some rumors that the dead Celestial's body may prove to be the source of Adamantium.

Adamantium, for those not versed in Marvel lore, is the fictional metal implanted into the skeleton of Wolverine. It's often called the hardest metal known to humankind, and its indestructibility is why Wolverine's claws never get dull. However, because Adamantium finds its origins in X-Men lore, the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't legally allowed to use it as a plot element in its stories back when the X-Men were still under the license of Fox (whereas the MCU is owned by Disney). Instead of Adamantium, then, the MCU leaned heavily on an equally magical substance called Vibranium, a metal with ineffable and powerful properties. In the "Black Panther" movies, the fictional country of Wakanda was said to have advanced to futuristic levels thanks to a Vibranium deposit. Even Captain America's shield is made of the substance.

When Disney purchased Fox in 2017, it finally granted the MCU access to X-Men characters and terminology. The franchise has already hinted at the inclusion of the X-Men on several occasions. Evan Peters, who played Quicksilver in Fox's "X-Men" films, had a winking cameo in the MCU series "WandaVision," while the X-Men's longtime leader, Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), was mercilessly killed in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness." (It's okay, he was a parallel universe duplicate.) Then, at the end of "The Marvels," Beast (Kelsey Grammar) appeared, noting that an MCU character had slipped into his dimension by accident.

The X-Men dam will finally burst with the release of "Deadpool & Wolverine" in July 2024. Wolverine will officially become part of the MCU, along with his Adamantium skeleton, and the MCU can now make as many references to the fictional metal as it likes.

But, of course, if the metal is now said to be present in the MCU, where was it all this time? Why weren't there organic, story reasons to mention it before? If Adamantuim is suddenly a part of the MCU, it will have to be "discovered" in some way, right?

Well, thanks to "Eternals," there is now a god-sized statue, made of some unknown ore, sticking up out of the ocean. No one in the MCU has said exactly how large Tiamut's body is, but it seems to be somewhere in the thousands-of-megatons range. If that body is made of Adamantium, then it could provide raw materials to make as many Wolverine skeletons as the MCU might require. It will also allow Kevin Feige and the other Marvel executives to more accurately represent the extant language of Marvel Comics, a universe that includes both Adamantium and Vibranium.

More than anything, though, it will be a relief to hear any mention at all of Tiamut. "Eternals" may not have been one of the more widely beloved film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — it currently holds a mere 47% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — but it was broadly significant. It provided an existential crisis for Earth and left a new god-shaped island on the landscape. "Eternals" was released in 2021, while "Brave New World" is due in theaters on February 14, 2025. It took four years, but the series is finally facing the consequences of its own ambitious writing.