The MCU Has Made The Last Hero You’d Expect Into A Scarlet Witch Replacement

The MCU has replicated Scarlet Witch's story with one other hero, who is just about the last hero you'd expect to effectively become a Scarlet Witch replacement in this sense despite the clear parallels between the two. The MCU timeline often has its heroes mirror one another or serve similar roles - partially for practical reasons, and partially for thematic reasons, since these parallels can be striking.

However, it's also easy for some parallels between characters to be overlooked - especially when it comes to figures who get little to no shared screen time in their respective MCU arcs. This is the case for the parallels between Scarlet Witch and one other MCU hero's current story in the franchise - though it's also perhaps easy to miss given just how grim the similarities between the two are.

Spider-Man's Devastating Backstory Effectively Make Him The MCU's Closest Thing To A Scarlet Witch Replacement Story-Wise

While Peter Parker and Wanda Maximoff's lives couldn't be more different in many ways in the MCU, these figures have faced some of the franchise's most expansive and pervasive tragedies - especially in some of their last main on-screen roles - meaning the recent chapters of their stories mirror one another notably.

Wanda's experiences losing her parents, her brother, and her partner and children (and losing Vision for the second time) in early 2021 with WandaVision are regarded as some of the MCU's most poignant storylines. Similarly, we saw Spider-Man also lose all his living loved ones by the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home only months later, as a result of the death of Aunt May and the finale spell that wipes any memories of him from the mind of his girlfriend and best friend along with the rest of the population.

As such, Spider-Man's next steps in the MCU will effectively explore the aftermath of him losing everything and having to start again - offering the MCU another chance to explore this territory for a superhero, since the Scarlet Witch instead became the primary antagonist of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Spider-Man's Current MCU Story Could Flip Scarlet Witch's Ending For Peter Parker

Spider-Man's recent tragedies position him to be a character who can relate to just about every other hero's personal struggles - and someone who has less to lose in a sense at this current point in time, having made a major sacrifice for the good of his universe.

Combine this with the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home teaching Peter about the multiverse and the dangers of it, and it seems likely that Parker will play a key role in some part of the Multiverse Saga's Avengers movies - if only so the films have an extra excuse to bring back Maguire and Garfield's variants alongside him.

Interestingly, this would mean that, while Spider-Man and the Scarlet Witch's stories mirror each other currently, the next chapters of the MCU could flip things around, and instead have Spider-Man losing everyone he cared for be the precursor to some of his most heroic acts yet, rather than the prelude for a final villainous twist, as currently appears to have been the case for Wanda herself.