The MCU's Scarlet Witch possesses a drastically different powerset to her comic book counterpart. Played by Elizabeth Olsen, Scarlet Witch is undeniably one of the most powerful of the Avengers. In Avengers: Endgame, she went one-on-one against Thanos, tearing his armor apart and forcing him to order his Sanctuary II ship to bombard the battlefield before he was defeated. This feat is all the more remarkable when you remember that Thanos had been able to defeat Thor, and would have killed the God of Thunder if not for Captain America's intervention.
In the comics, Scarlet Witch was introduced as a member of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Stan Lee decided to switch things up by having Scarlet Witch and her brother Quicksilver become part of the second wave of Avengers, though, and since then she's generally been treated as a superhero. Over the years, Scarlet Witch has been subject to a frankly remarkable number of retcons, affecting everything from her background to her powerset. The MCU's adaptation has attempted to present the character in a more straightforward manner, although there are signs the movies are about to conduct some retcons as well.
All that means it's fascinating to compare and contrast the Scarlet Witch of the MCU with her comic book counterpart. Just how do their powers compare?
It's actually pretty difficult to pin down Scarlet Witch's powers in the comics, in large part because of the sheer number of retcons she's gone through over the decades. Wanda Maximoff was introduced as a mutant in the X-Men books, but Marvel soon blurred the lines and revealed that she was both a mutant and a mystic. Her powers have been tied to a quasi-demonic entity called Chthon, an Elder God who dwells on another plane of reality and seeks to conquer our own. Scarlet Witch was born in a place that was rich in magical energy, and as a result Chthon was able to imbue her with latent mystical potential. As her powers expanded, she unwittingly began to tap into that potential, and so Chthon was given a chance to possess her.
Scarlet Witch manipulates a primal force known as Chaos Magic, which affects the nature of reality itself. At its most basic level, this allows Wanda to project devastating Hex Bolts or alter probability in a localized area. But as her powers expanded, Wanda learned she had the ability to rewrite reality at a whim. This was demonstrated in 2005's "House of M" event, when Wanda created an alternate timeline where she granted everyone their conflicting, confused heart's desires. Fortunately, the nature of Chaos Magic meant that this new branch of the Multiverse was unstable, and a number of heroes regained their true memories and confronted Wanda.
Unfortunately, these reality-warping abilities naturally make Scarlet Witch mentally unstable. As Doctor Strange noted in Avengers #503, Wanda possessed abilities that she had neither earned nor understood. "Can you understand the delicate mindset of a woman, a person, who has control over reality," he asked the Avengers. "It means reality controls her. Imagination becomes the enemy. Structure disappears." Every day, Wanda faces the temptation to wish away anything bad. And every time she does that, her grip on reality begins to slip away.
In 2016, writer James Robinson was placed in charge of an ongoing Scarlet Witch series, in which Wanda learned that she was a literal witch. Chaos Magic was re-envisioned as a misunderstanding of "the energy of the Earth and womankind," an ancient force that had been feared and suppressed by men. Scarlet Witch developed her mystic potential, becoming more powerful than ever before, tapping into magics that are unknown by male sorcerers and wizards like Doctor Strange. There was still a cost - this time upon her body, which began to age at an accelerated rate - but accepting her true nature at last afforded Wanda freedom from the psychological burdens she had carried for years. That's the version of Scarlet Witch currently found in the comics, although her witchcraft is less explicit and heavy-handed than in the Robinson run.
The MCU's version of Scarlet Witch was granted superhuman powers when she was subjected to Baron Von Strucker's experiments with the Mind Stone. The Marvel Studios Visual Dictionary hints that the Mind Stone isn't necessarily the source of her abilities; rather, it could potentially have awoken something dormant within her. "Wanda's internal neuro-electric interface allows her to conjure blasts of red telekinetic energy," it explains. "She can also use this energy to create barriers, levitate and move objects; to communicate and read thoughts by telepathy; and even to manipulate the minds of others."
In the MCU, Scarlet Witch is essentially a Jean Grey analogue, gifted with both telepathic and telekinetic powers. Although Avengers: Age of Ultron divided its time equally between both talents, since then the MCU has been almost exclusively interested in her telekinesis. Wanda has been presented as increasingly powerful but initially unfocused, and she made catastrophic errors of judgment in Captain America: Civil War. By the time of Avengers: Endgame, though, Wanda had learned how to multitask. She was able to both keep Thanos at bay and single-handedly destroy an Infinity Stone in Avengers: Infinity War. Meanwhile, just as in the comics, there appears to be a link between Scarlet Witch's raw power and her emotional stability. The more upset she is, the more devastatingly powerful she becomes, as Thanos ultimately learned to his cost.
But it's important to note that the MCU may be preparing to retcon Scarlet Witch as well. In one interview back in 2016, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige compared her powers to Doctor Strange's, and suggested that they operate in the same way. According to Feige, the key difference is that "she never had any training; she's figuring it out. Arguably, you could say that that's why her powers are much more chaotic and much more loose [than Doctor Strange's]." That retcon may well explain why Scarlet Witch is set to appear in Doctor Strange 2 - and it may suggest the MCU version of Wanda Maximoff is about to become a lot more like her comic book counterpart.
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