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Why It’s OK For Scarlet Witch To Have Different Powers In Avengers: Age Of Ultron

By Nick Tylwalk

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From what we’ve seen and been told so far, the Quicksilver we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron is going to be pretty faithful to the one we’ve known for years in the pages of Marvel Comics. Runs really fast, protective of his sister, and probably the owner of a somewhat abrasive personality. That’s Pietro in a nutshell.

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As for the Scarlet Witch, she might be a little more of a departure. I think Joss Whedon and company will present her character so that it feels familiar to comic fans, but her powers are definitely going to be different.

Here’s how Elizabeth Olsen, who is playing Scarlet Witch, described Wanda’s abilities to Empire Magazine (via ComicBookMovie.com):

"The extent of her powers isn’t fully explored in Ultron. But she can manipulate objects. And she has visions, and she has the ability to share them."

To me that, sounds like telekinesis and clairvoyance, two powers that aren’t really in Scarlet Witch’s repertoire in print. Normally, the grouchy old comic book fan in me would start complaining here, but I’m actually alright with this.

Understanding why involves a discussion of Wanda’s powers in the source material, and how they’ve been expanded and abused over the years. When she first hit the scene, the Scarlet Witch had the mutant ability to create “hexes” that caused highly improbable events to happen. She couldn’t usually control them, but they always worked to her benefit. So if you fired a gun at Wanda and it had a 1-in-1000 chance of jamming, it was closer to 1-in-1 if she hexed you.

Or, maybe a wall you’re standing by would all of a sudden turn magnetic, and you’d suddenly find yourself disarmed:

Probability manipulation is a cool, unique power, and one that Tony Stark would no doubt love, since it involves science, or at least math. It’s also difficult to explain without quite a bit of exposition. Age of Ultron is going to have all the Avengers we know and love, plus Ultron, Vision, the twins and even more new characters. We don’t have time for an info dump on Wanda’s powers, so tossing out the hexes is a good choice.

Gradually, writers decided to play up the “Witch” aspect of Scarlet Witch, giving her honest to goodness chaos magic as well. Combined with her talent for making the impossible possible, she ended up as Marvel’s biggest deus ex machina, able to do things like ridding the world of most of its mutants and overwriting reality itself. It got a bit ridiculous at times, to the point where when someone would ask me what exactly Wanda could do, I’d just shrug and say, “Whatever the writer wants her to do.”

Even at a less ridiculous level, chaos magic isn’t a can of worms we need to open in the Marvel Cinematic Universe just yet. We haven’t even been introduced to magic in general — though that will change once Doctor Strange arrives — and Marvel movies have always tended toward sci-fi explanations over mystical ones (see: Thor and the Asgardians).

That leaves us with manipulating objects and having vision, which seem perfect for Scarlet Witch, at least for now. They’re abilities that appear “witchy” enough, but also could easily be explained as mental powers, like with the ever popular “using more than 10 percent of her brain” line, than as the result of some otherwordly energy source. We haven’t seen any MCU characters with those abilities so far, and they don’t exclude Wanda from being able to do even more in subsequent appearances.

We won’t know for sure until May, but this has all the appearances of the rare case where deviating from the comics was the wisest course. I want to see a Scarlet Witch I can easily understand in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and if it has to be one different from the version I’m reading at the most basic level, I’m just fine with that.

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