Marvel Studios hasn’t yet announced any plans to actually give the X-Men their own Marvel Cinematic Universe movie — and even if the company announced one tomorrow, the production pipeline means it wouldn’t come out before 2027 or ’28 at the earliest. But that certainly hasn’t stopped the creative minds behind MCU movies from playing around in the borders of X-Men continuity, and Captain America: Brave New World is no exception.

Brave New World not only introduces a major pillar of the X-Men setting — adamantium, a metal that can cut through (almost) anything — it introduces it in a way that creates a foundation for a whole subcategory of X-Men characters. It’s subtle! It’s deft! It’s interesting! I definitely only noticed it because I’m a giant nerd!

And it would be great if I believed it was going anywhere.

Much of Brave New World’s plot revolves around the discovery that the Celestial corpse from Eternals, frozen mid-emergence in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is full of adamantium. The metal itself is just a name-drop in Brave New World: Its properties are never really unpacked or demonstrated. It’s........

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