Phase 4 of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe kicks off next May with the first standalone Black Widow movie, a prequel that’s supposed to bring us some sort of closure. After all, Natasha is dead and she’s never returning to the present-day Avengers — that present is 2023, by the way, given what happened in Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home. But Marvel is also working on other MCU Phase 4 titles as we speak, and we have a significant leak that confirms a key part of the upcoming Avengers storyline. This is something we’ve all suspected ever since we saw the Far From Home post-credits scenes, and it has apparently confirmed long before Marvel might have hoped.
Far From Home had two credits scenes, both important for the MCU story going forward. First of all, the world learned that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, which is something that never happened in Sony’s Spider-Man stories. More importantly, the second scene teases a potential Secret Wars storyline for the next epic Avengers movies and tells us that the world is already building SWORD, the evolution of SHIELD, without actually naming the new organization.
Well, lo and behold, the following photos that were taken from the WandaVision set, show the actual SWORD logo — that’s S.W.O.R.D., short for Sentient World Observation and Response Department.
According to JustJared, Elizabeth Olsen and Teyonah Parris are already working on the MCU Phase 4 series that’s set to premiere in the spring of 2021. Olsen is reprising her role as Wanda, of course, while Parris will play the grown-up version of Monica Rambeau, who was last seen in Captain Marvel as a young girl.
From the looks of it, Rambeau will be a SWORD agent, which makes plenty of sense. She’s seen aliens all the way back in the 1990s, and she knows both Captain Marvel and Nick Fury. Of course she would want to work with them.
But, again, the main revelation from these shots is that SWORD will appear in WandaVision. Of course, we could first see SWORD a lot earlier than that, given that we’re going to see a few other MCU films debut before this TV series hits Disney+. However, it’s still a great spoiler that gives us an idea of what mankind will be up to in the aftermath of the confrontation with Thanos, especially considering that there’s no SHIELD anymore to work with the Avengers. Not to mention that this SWORD leak indirectly supports the idea that the next epic Avengers film could be based on the Secret Wars storyline from the comics.
What’s also interesting is that, with SWORD, Marvel will introduce the first Fox property into the MCU, as ComicBook notes. The Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Deadpool must be surely coming as well, but this SWORD leak proves that Marvel is already working on incorporating the kind of Marvel properties it couldn’t have used before
To see more photos from the WandaVision set check out this link.
