By Brandon T. McClure
In a comedically long announcement, Marvel Studios announced the cast of the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. The next Avengers film will see new and old heroes face Robert Downey Jr. 's miscast Doctor Doom. Yet, they won’t be alone. Almost half the cast is made up of actors who haven’t been in a Marvel movie in a decade. Indeed, the X-Men are finally going to make their MCU debut, just not in the way that fans were expecting, and certainly not in the way they should be. It seems that Kevin Feige can now realize a nearly 20 year old dream and all it took was Disney buying 20th Century Fox. The cast from 2000s X-Men and 2003s X2: X-Men United are back (plus Kelsey Grammer from X3: X-Men United).
Since Disney purchased 20th Century Fox in 2019, fans have been wondering when the Fantastic Four and the X-Men will make their MCU enternance. While the Fantastic Four have made that debut this year, news of the X-Men has been sparse. The internet is littered with fan theories and rumors ranging from the mundane to the ridiculous. This question has obviously been on the mind of everyone at Marvel Studios as well. Many fans felt that the X-Men were too big of a property to introduce in the same way that every character or team has been previously introduced. How do you explain their long absence when they have such an expanded history? This is the same scrutiny that the Eternals fell into back in 2001. If they have been around so long, why didn’t they help defeat Thanos?
Eternals is likely why the multiverse approach was taken. For example, Fantastic Four: First Steps is set in an alternate timeline to get away from the “Thanos” question. While comic book audiences are accustomed to not questioning why past events didn’t include newly introduced heroes, the same cannot be said for film audiences. The MCU has trained general audiences to accept “silly” ideas or concepts that comic book audiences have been accepting for decades, but this was a hurdle they couldn’t get over. So the multiverse was needed. While Namor (Tenoch Huerta) in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Ms. Marvel (Iman Vilani) in Ms. Marvel were introduced as MCU mutants, major characters like Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Beast (Kelsey Grammer) were relegated to the multiverse with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and The Marvels. However, this highlights a growing concern within Marvel Studios.
Rather than recasting the X-Men, Marvel Studios has chosen to bring back the original actors who burst onto the screen clad in black leather. A team that people don't even remember fondly and constantly talk about how misguided the films were. Marvel Studios is looking for the instant gratification of feeling like they're the biggest franchise in the world again. They know that the secret ingredient to making a quick billion dollar hit is to add aging former Marvel stars like in Spider-Man: No Way Home and the aforementioned Deadpool & Wolverine. The sad thing is that it's going to work. Avengers: Doomsday will be the biggest movie in the world regardless of how good it is because of all the returning actors that are known and unknown. The only film that will be bigger is Avengers: Secret Wars which comes out the following year.
Interestingly, this seems to be the realization of a major dream of Kevin Feiges. Having been part of the production of almost every Marvel film from X-Men to the formation of Marvel Studios, Feige probably has a lot of affection for the casts of these earlier films. In an alternate take for the post-credits scene of Iron Man, Nick Fury alludes to the X-Men and Spider-Man, which seems to imply that Feige, at some point, thought that he could connect all the Marvel films being produced by different studios under one universe. Rights issues don’t work that way and since Marvel sold the rights to various heroes, including the X-Men and Spider-Man in the 90s, Feige had to settle and build the Avengers with what he had. The rest is history, as they say.
Deadpool & Wolverine was supposedly meant to be a farewell of sorts to the pre-MCU era of Marvel films. Faced with the destruction of his entire universe, Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), is sent to the wasteland, the TVA’s dumping grounds (This makes sense if you’ve seen Loki). Here he meets dozens of heroes and villains from across the Marvel multiverse such as Chris Evans as the Human Torch, Wesley Snipes as Blade, and Dafne Keen as X-23. Channing Tatum is also there as a version of Gambit that only exists in an ambitious cast photo from a Comic Con long past. Wade has to find a version of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to replace the one that died in Logan so that his universe can be saved. Sadly the film ultimately collapses under the weight of its references and only continues to muddy the already complicated X-Men timeline (is it the same timeline from the end of The Marvels? Because Beast should be dead). No one believed that it would be the promised “farewell” since everyone figured most, if not all these characters would show up in Avengers: Secret Wars. Frankly, they should have committed to the film serving as an ending to those characters and used the goodwill to move on.
There’s been a trend in the 21st century of older actors returning to roles many many years after their initial time as the character. Star Trek: Picard, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Terminator: Dark Fate, Top Gun: Maverick and so on and so on. There’s value to seeing older actors reprise these roles because it has destigmatized age and allowed older audiences to realize that there is no such thing as aging out of something. But, this trend has become so successful that it has begun to overshadow new and upcoming talent; creating an environment where younger audiences don’t have heroes of their own and are forced to relate to the heroes of a bygone age. Rather than giving a new generation an X-Men team to relate to, Marvel Studios has decided to give older fans their X-Men back. Although, it’s arguable over whether or not these older fans even want to see “their “ X-Men back. At a time when the MCU should be focusing on new heroes, they’ve doubled down on old ones which speaks more to how they’ve done a poor job cultivating a new generation of heroes (where are the Young Avengers Feige??)
That original X-Men cast are getting quite old at this point with none of the announced returning cast members younger than 51. Fans have always enjoyed seeing returning actors in outfits they didn’t wear when they were initially cast. Patrick Stewart in the yellow hover chair, Hugh Jackman in the yellow and blue, and Kelsey Grammer as a CGI Beast that looked closer to his comic book counterpart then he did in X-Men: The Last Stand. The internet got very excited when the announcement of these returning actors dropped. Curiously so. Is the excitement just so 60 year old Alan Cumming will look closer to his comic book counterpart? Or perhaps fans are excited to see James Marsden (51 and looking good by the way) in blue spandex, Ian McKellen (87) with a slightly different looking helmet, or Rebecca Romijn (52) in a white sleeveless dress with a belt made of skulls? Should Marvel Studios go all in on nostalgia and put them in black spandex again? Is that really all it takes for people to get excited? Or do fans want to see new actors take on these roles with a new director that actually likes the X-Men (this is a snipe against Bryan Singer, not the Russo Brothers). It’s too late to stop the juggernaut (heh) of Avengers: Doomsday. But the smell of desperation is all over it. A new cast of X-Men should have been the priority, and not whatever this is.
Recently Kevin Feige has confirmed that Avengers: Secret Wars will lead to a soft reboot by saying there are plans to “reset singular timelines” and promised that classic superheroes will begin to get recast. “X-Men is where that will happen” he said to a crowd of journalists. So there are plans to recast the X-Men as he also confirmed that Jake Schreier, director of Thunderbolts* will be directing whatever they’ll call the first X-Men film produced by Marvel Studios. But you can’t help but wonder if this is a little late for Marvel. Perhaps they’ve overthought it and in response to the questions posed by Eternals (why didn’t they fight Thanos?) and their desire to regain their notoriety in pop culture, they’ve dug themselves deeper into a hole of unoriginality and nostalgia. Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars feel like desperate pleas for an audience's affection where Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame felt like a victory lap.