The main MCU’s Earth-616 reality may have already lost its “Anchor Being”. A new concept introduced to the MCU thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s widely expected the anchor beings will continue to be an ongoing facet in Marvel Studio’s ongoing Multiverse Saga. Set to end with Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, one can imagine that anchor beings will play just as big of a role as incursions, but what does this mean for Earth-616?
Custom Image by Kevin Erdmann
Earth-616 and the Sacred Timeline are where most MCU movies occur. However, new dimensions and realities have been explored as the Multiverse Saga expands. Earth-838 was visited in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Earth-10005 was more recently introduced in Deadpool & Wolverine, the reality and timeline in which Fox’s X-Men movies take place. Deadpool & Wolverine also introduced the concept of “Anchor Beings”, key individuals in each reality who essentially keep their realities from degrading. While Earth-616’s anchor being is still unknown, there are concerns that they may already be dead ahead of the Multiverse Saga’s conclusion.
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Deadpool & Wolverine revealed that Wolverine himself was the anchor being of Earth-10005. As one of the most notable and important characters who undoubtedly served as a franchise focal point, it makes sense that Wolverine would be his reality’s anchor. However, his death in 2017’s Logan resulted in Earth-10005’s gradual degradation. Although it was said that this decline naturally takes over a couple of thousand years, the TVA’s Mister Paradox created a device known as Time Ripper to prune and erase reality sooner and all at once, hence Deadpool’s mission to save his home reality in the new MCU movie.
With consideration to Earth-616, there are a handful of prime candidates that could eventually be revealed as the anchor being the main MCU timeline. This includes the likes of Loki, Doctor Strange, or perhaps even Spider-Man: the biggest, best, most notable characters the primary Marvel reality has to offer. However, some of the very best candidates are already dead.
The exact criteria for what makes someone their reality’s anchor being is left ambiguous by Deadpool & Wolverine. However, it’s fair to guess that Iron Man would have been the anchor being of Earth-616 ahead of his sacrifice to save the world in Avengers: Endgame, having been a franchise focal point since the very beginning, much like Wolverine himself. Similarly, Black Widow also sacrificed herself to save those she cared about, just like Logan and Stark. Also, the recently deceased Scarlet Witch was known as a powerful nexus “being”, another multiversal concept that Marvel’s Kevin Feige has already teased could be synonymous with anchor beings.
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At the moment, it’s still unknown who might be revealed as the anchor being of Earth-616, That said, it’s more than likely that they’ll be revealed in future projects, especially as the MCU gets closer to the Multiverse Saga’s Avengers movies. However, it would certainly be a major twist if the reveal was one of these aforementioned MCU heroes that are dead, the implication being that Earth-616 has already been degrading in secret.
While there haven’t been any teases that the main MCU reality has already started declining, the threat of incursions has been a looming threat since Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, events in which realities can collide and destroy each other in the process. Paired with the dangers of losing anchor beings, it does seem as though the puzzle pieces are coming together for a major multiversal crisis that will need to be solved, most likely in the next two Avengers movies coming in 2026 and 2027.
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Thankfully, Deadpool & Wolverine’s ending does provide a solution if Earth-616 truly is in a state of degradation as Earth-10005 was. Following Wade Wilson and Logan’s successful defeat of Cassandra Nova and the destruction of the Time Ripper, it was revealed that the Fox X-Men universe had begun to stabilize, seemingly just as Deadpool hoped it would by taking a Wolverine from another reality back to his own, effectively making this Logan variant a replacement anchor. It’s also possible that this replacement idea only took hold after Deadpool and Wolverine sacrificed themselves to save this reality, effectively making them co-anchors going forward.
Either way, Earth-10005 still stands and is no longer gradually declining in the multiverse. To that end, perhaps a replacement anchor or something along those lines will need to happen for the main Earth-616, when and if it’s revealed that its own anchor has already been lost. After all, Iron Man certainly does seem like the prime candidate to have been the 616 anchor being.
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The End of the Multiverse?
The concept of anchor beings will more than likely be a recurring plot point in the MCU going forward. It could very well be a way in which new incursions can be triggered, perhaps even leading to sinister plans by powerful villains to discover and intentionally target anchor beings across the multiverse to bring about its eventual end. Likewise, anchor beings could even be why Robert Downey Jr. is set to return to the MCU as Doctor Doom, perhaps being the result of an “anchor being crisis” following the loss of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame (assuming Stark was indeed 616’s anchor).
At any rate, it’s certainly not out of the question to suggest that the anchor being of Earth-616 may have already been lost ahead of the Multiverse Saga’s concluding crossovers. Thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine, a whole new avenue of theory and speculation has been opened, one that’s very exciting with dramatic ramifications for the MCU. As such, it’s going to be very exciting to one day learn who Earth-616’s anchor being is (or was).
