Jake Schreier’s upcoming X-Men reboot will be reinventing many members of the titular superhero team for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and this could include Emma Frost, whose counterpart in The Boys and Gen V provides a fantastic blueprint. Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier was announced as the director of the MCU’s X-Men reboot back in June, and work on the highly anticipated movie has officially started. Even so, we’re yet to find out which members of the X-Men will be included in the reboot, but it’s high time that the formidable telepath Emma Frost gets justice on-screen.
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After being snubbed from X-Men: The Last Stand back in 2006, Emma Frost’s subsequent live-action appearances in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise were disappointing. Tahyna MacManus’ iteration has been renounced in the years since X-Men Origins: Wolverine, while January Jones had Frost’s look right in X-Men: First Class, but was missing the character’s personality. Emma Frost needs to be done right in the MCU, and Marvel Studios could replicate the trajectory of Maddie Phillips’ Cate Dunlap in The Boys and its spinoff, Gen V, to finally give Frost the attention she deserves.
How The Boys & Gen V’s Cate Dunlap Can Be Marvel’s Blueprint For Emma Frost
Maddie Phillips debuted as Cate, a Supe with the ability to control others’ minds through physical contact, in Gen V season 1. Originally an ally to the central group of The Boys’ spinoff, Cate was later revealed to have been manipulating them all without their knowledge, and became a bona fide villain in season 1’s finale as she led a revolution against regular humans at Godolkin University. Gen V season 2 offered Cate a fantastic redemption arc, and she has again become a powerful ally. This arc is the perfect blueprint for the MCU’s Emma Frost.
Emma Frost made her first Marvel Comics appearance in 1980’s The Uncanny X-Men #129 as the villainous White Queen of the Hellfire Club. She founded the Hellions team to become rivals to Charles Xavier’s New Mutants, and fought alongside Magneto and more before finally joining the X-Men after the disbanding of her next team, Generation X. After the mutant massacre on Genosha in 2001’s E is for Extinction, Frost gained the secondary ability of diamond-like skin. Added to her telepathic abilities, this made her one of Marvel’s most notable and powerful mutants — powerful enough even to later lead the X-Men.
Cate might not have diamond skin in Gen V, but her hard exterior and mental manipulation abilities make her a fantastic allegory of Emma Frost. Just like Cate has undergone a redemption arc, Emma Frost could experience the same in the MCU, finally bringing her Marvel Comics story into live-action more faithfully. Fox never knew how to handle Emma Frost on Earth 10005, routinely failing to capture the emotional depth, dramatic intensity, sex appeal, and sheer power of the villain-turned-hero. Marvel Studios can do better when the MCU’s X-Men reboot rolls around.
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