How the super-soldier serum will affect the future of the MCU

The super-soldier serum isn’t just a plot device for Phase 1 of the MCU. There’s more of the story to tell as we go through Phase 4 and beyond.

Several decades ago at the height of the second World War, Abraham Erskine perfected the super-soldier serum, according to MCU lore. It’s what took Steve Rogers from a super-zero to a superhero, and it’s been sought after ever since Erskine created it.

And while the super-soldier serum took the center stage in the first part of the MCU (in the Hulk movie and Captain America: The First Avenger), it looks like the serum will be playing a role in the next phase of the MCU moving forward. The Disney+ show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier already seems like it’s a prime opportunity to re-introduce the world’s quest to create the ultimate superhuman, and another potential MCU spinoff may take things even further.

Let’s look into how the super-soldier serum may return in the next phase of the MCU, and how it’ll affect further movies and TV shows moving forward.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

News broke earlier this week that Supergirl and Doctor Sleep actor Carl Lumbly had been cast in The Falcon in the Winter Soldier. The news hasn’t officially been announced on Marvel Studios’ part, and so his involvement in the project remains a mystery for now. That being said, many are speculating that Lumbly will play Isaiah Bradley, a character who’d been injected with another super-soldier serum as a soldier, and one who went on to become a version of Captain America.

In the comics, the character was also injected with the serum during World War II, so it’s likely he may be able to shed some light on other experiments the government and the military had been running behind everyone’s back. It’s possible this could have still been under S.H.I.E.L.D., despite how tortuous the experimentation would have been. But in knowing that H.Y.D.R.A. was also infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. for many years, it would make sense that they would allow that to happen.

It may also mean that over the years, they’ve found time to perfect the formula — possibly leading to the induction of Wyatt Russell’s character, U.S. Agent, to take up the Captain America name.

Thunderbolts

A rumored spinoff that may be coming to the MCU is the Thunderbolts. This project is said to be in early developments; it can go anyway in being either a series or a movie. But in a nutshell, the Thunderbolts would be a world-saving team assembled by Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who we’ve seen numerous times in the MCU so far.

Ross was responsible for leading new research on a super-soldier serum, leading him to bring on Bruce Banner to create the serum which ultimately went wrong and turned him into the Hulk. Now, as MCU Cosmic reports, the Red Hulk could make an appearance in the Thunderbolts — Red Hulk being Ross himself when he’s injected with the serum. Not only would this prove that following the Sokovia Accords, Ross is still wanting to take matters of the superhero business in his own hands — but he’d also be willing to go so far as to make himself a superhuman as well.

She-Hulk and more

With all that, there’s still the confirmed Disney+ series She-Hulk lurking in the developmental stages. In the comics, She-Hulk is lawyer Jennifer Walters, who’s a cousin of Bruce Banner. After getting shot and being found by Bruce, her cousin has no choice but to give her a blood transfusion… using his own gamma-radiated blood. Of course, this origin wouldn’t mean Jennifer is being directly injected with a super-soldier serum, but it does mean that there are other ways to transfer superhuman abilities from one person to the next.

At the same time, we’ll also see how the idea of creating superhumans takes form in the Ms. Marvel series featuring Kamala Khan. Kamala is an Inhuman — a human who has superhuman genes as a result of Kree experimentation. While Marvel did have the Inhumans show, the audience was small. And the presence of Inhumans was never fully established in the larger MCU.

This series may give them the opportunity to work with those comic book origins and show what happens when alien species try to create their own superhumans. Will the humans then try to copy these technologies from the Kree, or will they outcast Inhumans the way mutants have been in the X-Men?

The topic of eugenics is one that will never leave the MCU, and with the super-soldier serum at the heart of it all, it’s hard to say if its presence will ever stop being in the MCU.