MCU: 10 Fascinating Facts About Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
2. There's A Sneaky X-Men Reference
Marvel Comics
It would be a further four years until Marvel could even broach the possibility of using the X-Men in the MCU, but The Winter Soldier actually managed to include a sneaky reference to one of the teams from that corner of the Marvel Universe.
In the comics, Department H is a Canadian agency that headed up the country's superhero program. They were also originally responsible for Wolverine's adamantium graft, and later headed up the creation of Alpha Flight, Canada's own answer to the Avengers who've been synonymous with the X-Men for sometime.
The group only gets a passing mention in Winter Soldier during a conversation with Black Widow, but the Department would later be revisited in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. There, it is explained that the MCU version is still a Canadian branch, so might it even be possible that this is how Marvel will introduce some mutants into their onscreen apparatus? One can only hope.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
