How Avengers: Endgame Could Secretly Set Up The MCU X-Men

2. The Gamma Ray Theory

The first possibility is linked to the established logic that when the Infinity Gauntlet is used, it triggers an unprecedented energy shockwave that is off the charts. We learn this when the Avengers track Thanos to the Garden and discover that he has used the Stones to destroy themselves.

But what if that energy blast did something else too?

As Bruce Banner explains when the Avengers are weighing up who should wear the Stark Gauntlet, he's the only one who could possibly survive it because he's incredibly strong, but also because the energy is "mostly gamma radiation." In order words, it's the same stuff that turned him into Hulk in the first place, changing his genes fundamentally to "unlock" the Hulk within him.

It wouldn't take a great deal of writing to explain that the Infinity Stones had the ability to unlock latent mutant powers, since we've already seen them doing just that with the twins. In that case, the Mind Stone is used to experiment on them and they manage to survive while other guinea pigs died. If Marvel retcon that process slightly (or more simply add to the details of it), they could explain that the twins survived because of their mutant genes, which lay dormant.

And then to introduce a mass-scale "evolutionary event," they could say that the huge explosion of energy from any of the snaps could have triggered so much gamma radiation that everyone with the same dormant powers had their X-genes "woken up."

That's not even the only possible explanation...