Spoilers below for the second episode of Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched!
With Disney+’s latest super-series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law taking on a lighter and more comedic tone than most other Marvel Cinematic Universe fare, the series’ creative team were allowed the opportunity to handle things a little differently when it comes to making canonical connections and references. Fans are already eagerly anticipating Charlie Cox’s Daredevil making his small-screen return, with more heroic and villainous cameos set to pepper the rest of the debut season. But could one of those heroes possibly be the ever-beloved X-Man badass Wolverine? Probably not, but She-Hulk’s second episode did feature a two-second reference that absolutely comes across as a reference to the rage-filled mutant, and OMGOMGOMG. Ahem.
Around six minutes into the latest She-Hulk: Attorney at Law installment, Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters is stressing out in bed next to Ginger Gonzaga’s Nikki Ramos, having just lost her courtroom gig over a brawl with Jameela Jamil’s Titania. As she’s doing some job-hunting online, fans get a look at the website she’s perusing, which is where all the Wolverine alarm bells started going off. Check it out!
Now, the way that headline is worded, it almost sounds like a normal man was engaged in a bar fight against some metal claws, which would almost sound ridiculous if we weren’t talking about Marvel canon. Within this multiverse-laden corner of pop culture, a sentient set of metal claws isn’t exactly the hardest concept to buy into. I also wouldn’t be beyond baffled to learn that Kevin Feige somehow landed the rights to use Freddy Krueger in the MCU.
But all that nonsense aside, that moment almost definitely serves as a direct implication that Logan/Wolverine (and adamantium) exist in She-Hulk’s current timeline and universe, which would mark the first time the aggro-hero has been hinted at in a post-Hugh Jackman way. How massively would viewers’ minds be blown apart if rumored Wolverine replacement Taron Egerton actually showed up in a later episode as someone for Jennifer to defend in court?
Beyond that, it would seemingly serve as further “proof” that the mutants we all know and love are indeed a part of this existence now. Sure, Patrick Stewart reprised Charles Xavier for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but that obviously wasn’t tied to X-Men living in the standard MCU universe.
Technically, the She-Hulk reference to metal claws could be about Wolverine’s nemesis Sabretooth, whose own skeleton and claws were adamantium-ized within comic canon, though only in certain arcs. Plus, I think while Logan could easily fit as the “man” in that headline, Sabretooth would probably warrant a more dramatic descriptor.
Seemingly supporting the idea that Wolverine could one day show up is the idea that the headline just below the bar fight appears to be in reference to the outcome in Eternals, with the statue in question likely referring to the Celestial Tiamut, whose emergence from the Earth’s core was halted, leaving the entity stuck in stone with his hand and head sticking far above the ocean’s surface by the film’s ending. So if that news brief is for sure pointing to an event that 100% occurred within the official MCU, then it stands to reason that the Wolverine-esque reference isn’t as much of a joke as one might think.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law drops new episodes on Disney+ every Thursday morning, so be sure to keep watching to see who and what else from Marvel’s comic history will show up. Head to our 2022 TV premiere schedule to see what other new and returning shows are on the way!
