Marvel just announced its first X-Men movie. Sort of. Along with the elaborate cast announcement for Avengers: Doomsday, Marvel revealed that several stars from the original Fox X-Men series are returning, presumably as their original characters. There’s Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, Alan Cumming, and Kelsey Grammar, to start.
The cast is still coming and we’ll add more names when they’re revealed. But we think it’s safe to assume they’re playing Professor X, Magneto, Cyclops, Mystique, Nightcrawler, and Beast.
This is fascinating for a bunch of reasons. The first is that there are two X-Men casts. There are the ones from the 2000 original, X-Men, and the ones from the 2011 reboot/prequel, X-Men: First Class. Of course, they came together in a subsequent film, but if you had to choose which cast was going to shift over to the MCU, you would’ve guessed the younger one. Though, to be fair, both Stewart and Grammar have already reprised their roles in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Marvels.
Then there’s also the question of what narrative role these characters are going to play in an Avengers movie. They’re not Avengers. They’re X-Men. So is it possible they’re just sacrificial lambs so Doctor Doom, played by Robert Downey Jr., can prove his superiority? Would all of these actors return just to be killed off?
Clearly, we don’t know. We also don’t know if the versions of the characters that appear in Doomsday are the same X-Men from that universe. Deadpool & Wolverine, the actual first X-Men movie in the MCU, clearly established that there are multiple versions of all of these characters. And, with the reveal that Channing Tatum is returning as Gambit, we know that’s part of this. So, potentially, these are completely new ones. Or maybe they’re not even those characters.
Nevertheless, it’s very exciting for long-time superhero film fans to see these names pop up. The Fox universe has gotten a few chances at closure in the past, but coming back for an Avengers film feels like a whole new level.
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