DeMarr looks down and sees some very suspicious dark liquid oozing from a crack in the Roxxon dumpster. It appears to have created a kind of glittery, undulating sinkhole in the ground where it’s landed, and so he does what any normal person would do in such an “oh hell no” scenario – he sticks his damn hand into it.
The “good” news is that the gooey hole gives DeMarr some superpowers and subsequent fame. The bad news is that those superpowers eventually become scary and unpredictable. As a result, Hollywood decides the only safe way for the industry to function going forward is to ban superpowered individuals from working in it.
Roxxon’s Dark Past in the MCU
Anyone familiar with Roxxon’s Marvel Cinematic Universe history would have stayed well clear of whatever ended up in that dumpster. The company first popped up in the original Iron Man film in 2008, where it was established to be in the vicinity of Stark Industries’ headquarters. At that point, Roxxon remained a largely hidden threat, but in several popular Marvel TV shows, the company strayed from the shadows and became a rather more substantial evil corporation.
It was in Agent Carter that Roxxon finally emerged as a major recurring antagonist. In the post-WWII-set series, it competed with Howard Stark, stole Stark technology, and performed dangerous experiments with Isodyne Energy’s extradimensional substance, Zero Matter. We even met Roxxon’s villainous CEO, Hugh Jones (Ray Wise), in the series and saw the effects of the unstable Zero Matter on real people (it wasn’t good!).
Roxxon was back at it in Marvel’s little-seen Freeform show Cloak & Dagger in 2018, where the company was the main corporate antagonist. Roxxon’s dangerous New Orleans drilling operations into an unstable underground energy source caused a catastrophic explosion that killed several people and directly caused Tandy Bowen (Dagger) and Tyrone Johnson (Cloak) to develop powers. Tandy manifested light-based abilities (forming daggers), and Tyrone gained shadowy, portal-like abilities.
The Future of Roxxon in Wonder Man
Roxxon has more consistently embodied the human cost of corporate negligence as the MCU has evolved. It lurked in episodes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Runaways, but in Wonder Man, it’s clear that Roxxon’s evil presence lives on in the MCU, and the company doesn’t seem to have strayed far from its former dodgy extradimensional matter experiments.
