Magneto Was Right: How Should the MCU Portray Magneto?

Magneto and the X-Men are inextricably linked. The relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto basically created Xavier’s dream of human/mutant co-existence, and the disintegration of their friendship changed the world for mutants and humans alike. Magneto became the X-Men’s biggest villain, with his mutant-first way of looking at the world standing in direct conflict with the X-Men. Magneto started out as a rather cliche villain, but that would change as more was revealed about the character. Magneto became a more nuanced character, and eventually even joined the X-Men.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is going all-in on the X-Men, so the disposition of Magneto is very important. How Magneto is portrayed in the upcoming MCU X-Men movies is extremely crucial to what the team is going to be. Magneto has grown a lot in the eyes of the general audience thanks to the Fox movies and X-Men ’97, so that begs the question of how the MCU is going use him.

Magneto Has Huge Potential as a Hero or a Villain

Magneto is one of Marvel’s greatest characters, bar none. In the Silver Age, Magneto started out pretty much like all of the archvillains that Stan Lee wrote — a hyperbolic monster with very little else to the character. Going back and reading those old X-Men stories, there’s no indication of the Holocaust survivor whose life was changed forever by mankind’s darkest deeds. He was actually pretty similar to Doctor Doom in a lot of ways, though all of that would change when writer Chris Claremont took over writing the X-Men.

Claremont is the one responsible for everything fans love about Magneto. He added nuance to the character, revealing the tragedy at the heart of him. Magneto’s hatred of humanity came from a place that most readers could understand: his life as a victim of Nazis and racism showed him that the world wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. We empathized with Magneto, but we also saw that his own supremacist beliefs made him no different than the humans he hated so much. However, Claremont also decided that Magneto would realize this, leading to the character becoming an ally of the X-Men in the 1980s. Since then, Magneto’s status quo has changed numerous times, going back and forth between hating the X-Men and humanity and working with them. Currently, he’s basically the mascot of Cyclops’s team of X-Men, his body wracked by a disease stemming from Krakoan resurrection.

Magneto in media outside of comics has also been through these changes. X-Men: The Animated Series, the Fox X-Men movies, and later animated series all established Magneto’s full origin, building the character into a much more nuanced villain. The Fox X-Men movies did a fantastic job with Magneto, with Sir Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender both playing every side of the character. X-Men ’97 showed Magneto as a mutant leader, helping lead the X-Men, and even establishing the relationship between Rogue and Magneto. The season ended with Magneto’s most savage moment — his attack on Wolverine, ripping out his adamantium, again showing off the character’s many facets.

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So, which direction should the MCU go? Magneto has potential either way, as shown by the various X-Men media out there. The MCU likes to go for a rather simple status quo, one that will be familiar to most fans. Looking at it from that perspective, Magneto will almost certainly start out as a villain. However, the great thing about Magneto is that the MCU can just start him out as a more heroic version of the Master of Magnetism. They went in that direction with X-Men ’97, picking up almost thirty-year-old plotlines and kicking the show off with Magneto as leader of the X-Men, so it’s actually very hard to predict which way Marvel Studios is going to go with Magneto.

Magneto plays off so many characters so very well. There’s obviously his relationship with Xavier, but Magneto also goes with characters like Cyclops and Jean Grey, who he’s known for years. His grudge against Wolverine is also one of the more interesting — Magneto and Wolverine’s hatred of each other motivates both of them to go hard in battle. Magneto and Rogue, Magneto and Gambit, Magneto and Kitty Pryde, there are so many options for the character either way, but he MCU can only go in one direction with the character to begin with and the best one is definitely as a villain.

Magneto Should Begin as a Villain and Grow From There, Just Like in the Comics

There are a lot of fans out there who want Magneto as a hero in the MCU right from the start and that makes a lot of sense. “Magneto was right” has become something of a meme nowadays, but in today’s political climate, a member of a marginalized community saying that the majority wants to destroy them isn’t exactly wrong. Magneto is a “vibe” right now, but that doesn’t mean that the best Magneto to join the MCU is the one that fans have been given in recent years — a character who has grown and changed to a heavy extent, that has become one of the X-Men’s most stalwart members.

Magneto benefits as a character the most when fans are allowed to go on his journey. Magneto is correct about human nature, but his solution to that — killing everyone who isn’t a mutant — is evil. Watching him develop and realize that not all humans are monsters is a huge part of what makes Magneto so compelling. Everyone wants Magneto tearing apart fascists and racists, and we can still get that with the long-burn Magneto storytelling from the comics — he’ll just be a villain for a bit. It’s all the sweeter to watch Magneto become something more.

The MCU doesn’t always do a great job of showing character growth. For every Iron Man, there’s a Thor, at worst, or a Doctor Strange, at best, yet growth is an important part of Magneto. Fox was able to get it right, which is a minor miracle, so Marvel Studios almost certainly will be able to as well. Magneto may have been right, but the journey is the key to the character, not the destination.