How Kevin Smith Thinks WandaVision Can Reintroduce These Marvel Heroes

It's a cherished Hollywood tradition: when you need something nerdy discussed enthusiastically, you turn to Kevin Smith. He's the last in a noble line, Plato's ideal form of the stoner behind the comic book shop, rattling off encyclopedically well-informed theories on where a geeky franchise might be going — and no series needs its storyline unraveled by an expanded mind more than WandaVision, Marvel Studios' answer to the question "why aren't more MCU entries making our brains bleed?" 

Luckily, Smith is apparently just as excited about the show as the rest of us, and took some time during one of his many regularly scheduled podcasts to wax speculative about what could be coming. Particularly suspicious to the filmmaker and internet personality's eyes was a brief exchange between Monica Rambeau and the head of S.W.O.R.D. during WandaVision's fourth episode, in which Rambeau is told that she won't be headed out of Earth's atmosphere any time soon — news that apparently takes her aback.

"Five years ago she was used to going to space, apparently, and now five years, like after the Blip, they're not letting people go," Smith summarized on a recent episode of his Fatman Beyond podcast. "Now, when [S.W.O.R.D. acting director Tyler Hayward] said 'we're concentrating now on the quantum and blah blah blah unmanned missions,' that smells like Fantastic Four, doesn't it? It smells like they had shut down, like, manned missions and now they're out of it. Feels like somewhere in there, like, the Fantastic Four lies."

The Fantastic Four, composed of Reed Richards, Ben Grimm, and Johnny and Sue Storm, are comic book royalty, and their groovy 1960s origin story would fit S.W.O.R.D. and the Blip like a glove made of unstable molecules. Originally, Marvel's First Family gained their remarkable abilities after taking an unsanctioned trip into space, back when "we need to do [x] before the Soviets" was still a generally accepted motivation for most actions. Struck by a storm of cosmic radiation, they had their physiologies altered, and became stretchy, rocky, fiery, and invisible-y, respectively.

As alluded to by Kevin Smith, life-altering, super-empowering space accident seems like exactly the sort of thing that would cause most shady government organizations to take pause and tighten restrictions, so the potential for WandaVision's events to have a connection to the FF seems tenable. Additionally, WandaVision has already mentioned cosmic radiation, the source of the team's transformation, alongside Endgame's near name drop of "a power surge of ridiculously cosmic proportions" when Thanos first used the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet. Mix all of that with the fact that Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige's recent announcement that plans are underway to introduce the Fantastic Four into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and all signs point to Silent Bob being onto something here.

Will it pan out? Who knows? WandaVision is slated to continue through the beginning of March, so there's still plenty of clobberin' time for big reveals.