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The first official glimpse of a piece of X-Men mythology in the Marvel Cinematic Universe came in 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, when Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier showed up as part of a multiversal Illuminati — but fans almost got to see a very unexpected slice of X-lore a year earlier in the Disney+ series Loki.

For those who need some context, movie and television rights for Marvel’s X-Men and associated characters had, for decades, been held by 20th Century Fox instead of Marvel’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company as a result of deals made before Marvel had been acquired by Disney in 2009. That changed a decade later when Disney went on to buy 20th Century Fox itself, meaning that Wolverine, Storm, Deadpool, and the rest of the X-Men could be folded into the MCU at any point from then on… except nothing happened on that front until 2022’s Doctor Strange sequel.

Turns out, there was almost an earlier X-Men canon entry into the MCU — in what might be the least imaginable way possible.

“There is a lot of creative freedom within the MCU. I think Loki is the weirdest thing in the world,” screenwriter Michael Waldron recently declared during a Reddit AMA. “I can't think of many times I was told no. Maybe when I originally wrote a deleted version of the Mojoverse into the Void.”

Yup, the Mojoverse — the media-obsessed reality run by relatively obscure X-Men villain Mojo, which traditionally doesn’t just feature the cast of cartoonish characters including Major Domo, Spiral, and Ricochet Rita… but also a team of infant clones of the X-Men called, what else, the X-Babies. (No, honestly, they’re real.)

Who knows why Marvel Studios decided that this was the one time they’d say no: was it because Loki was already full of some out-there ideas for MCU fans? Could the Mojoverse have been deemed too expensive to recreate for what would essentially have been a cameo? We may never know, but let’s just pretend it’s because someone else at the studio already has plans for Mojo and his media cohorts… just in case we can manifest that into reality in the process.

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