Ms. Marvel Is A Huge Step Forward For The MCU’s Next Avengers Team

The upcoming Ms. Marvel series is a major step towards an eventual MCU version of Young Avengers. At the moment, there isn’t any explicit confirmation that Young Avengers will be part of the MCU, even with the various things that have been done to set it up. However, the very nature of Ms. Marvel makes the idea of it happening even more likely.

Multiple movies and TV shows in Phase 4 have introduced characters who make up the Young Avengers, a team of young superheroes in the comics who can be seen as Marvel’s equivalent to DC’s Young Justice or the Teen Titans. WandaVision introduced Wanda’s children Billy and Tommy, who are child versions of Wiccan and Speed, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier introduced Eli Bradley a.k.a. Patriot, Loki introduced Kid Loki, Hawkeye introduced Kate Bishop, and most recently, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduced America Chavez. Going back even further than Phase 4, Ant-Man introduced Cassie Lang a.k.a. Stature, and Avengers: Endgame aged her up into a teenager, so it’s easy enough to conclude that a Young Avengers project is in the works.

The idea of a Young Avengers project happening makes even more sense with the upcoming Ms. Marvel series. All of the previous characters mentioned usually only had minor roles in the MCU stories they appeared in; in the case of Kate Bishop and America Chavez, while they were main characters in Hawkeye and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the actual protagonists were Hawkeye and Doctor Strange, respectively. Ms. Marvel, however, is the first time that an MCU show is making a teenage character the central protagonist, and with Kamala Khan already confirmed to star in 2023’s The Marvels, it makes it clear that the MCU wants to put younger characters in starring roles, and Young Avengers would be the easiest way to do that.

The biggest wrinkle in that idea stems from how, despite being a young Marvel superhero, Kamala Khan has never been part of the Young Avengers in the comics, but even that can be worked around. While Kamala hasn’t been a Young Avenger, she is a founding member of the Champions, another superhero team comprised of young superheroes, so Kamala being in a hypothetical Young Avengers team could be justified if the MCU’s version of Young Avengers takes elements from Champions. Something like that might have already been set up with how The Falcon and the Winter Soldier introduced Joaquin Torres, another member of the Champions, and set him up to replace Sam Wilson as Falcon as he did in the comics. Characters from Young Avengers and the Champions are being brought into the MCU, but since having two teams of young superheroes could be superfluous, it would make sense to combine the two, and between the two of them, Young Avengers would be the most appropriate, as they were conceived as a more straightforward superhero team.

The idea of the MCU doing Young Avengers has been talked about for years, and Ms. Marvel makes it all the more likely to happen. While Ms. Marvel‘s Kamala Khan isn’t part of the team in the comics, the show’s very existence is positive proof of the MCU wanting to highlight the younger characters, and a superhero team comprised of them would be the easiest way to do that. Nothing about MCU’s Young Avengers has been confirmed yet, but with everything the MCU’s done over the past few years, it’s easy to see the foundation as having already been laid out.