Marvel Studios is ready to meet with writers and take pitches for the upcoming reboot of the X-Men superhero team into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to a report at Deadline. Meetings will start within the next 10 weeks, and could continue into the New Year. How wide of latitude writers would have in developing an X-Men project remains to be seen.
American actress Jennifer Lawrence as Raven, aka Mystique in a scene from the film ‘X-Men: First … [+]
Deadpool 3 is technically the first official standalone (confirmed) mutant movie set in the MCU, releasing in May 2024. It also includes several members of the cinematic X-Men franchise, although these personifications of those characters are carrying over from various versions of their 20th Century Fox/Studios films, although Marvel is expected to generally reboot the X-Men once they fully cross over fully into the MCU now that parent company Disney owns both studios.
The Fox versions of the X-Men previously appeared in the MCU in Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, with Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Charles Xavier. This incarnation of the character, however, was a different version from the exact one in the X-Men series — a bit of an odd statement, in light of the imprecise nature of the word “precise” when it comes to the Fox X-Men continuity.
Going forward, Marvel will reinvent the mutants and X-Men within the studio’s shared superhero world. But the X-Men aren’t expected to appear until after the Fantastic Four are introduced in their own solo outing in 2025 and the Multiverse Saga concludes in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars.
Some expect the X-Men and mutants in general to arrive into the MCU via some multidimensional crossover outcome from Secret Wars. That comic book storyline famously sent different realities/universes within different Marvel continuity crashing into one another, until surviving pieces wound up intertwined in a single new shared world together.
That’s the most well-known version of a story with that title nowadays, from the Secret Wars series by Jonathan Kickman and Esad Ribić. The title originally belonged to a miniseries by Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck, in which all of the Marvel superheroes and villains were put on a makeshift planet that served as a battlefield for the two sides to fight to the death. In that storyline, the X-Men wound up largely separated from the Avengers and the rest of the superhero team due to prejudices against mutants and in part due to the presence of Magneto, whom many other heroes considered a villain for his willingness to kill and inflict civilian casualties.
The film will probably borrow some elements from both stories and use an adaptation of their connective tissue (but maybe via Kang instead of Beyonders) to work the two into a single MCU film that leans into the “incursion” storyline with its multiverse and crossovers remaking the universe. The opportunity to retcon, reboot, and instantly adapt all manner of characters and turn the MCU into some completely new entity exists, so it would be easy to use this as a means of incorporating mutant and X-Men into whatever new MCU exists when Avengers: Secret Wars ends.
However, it’s also true that mutants have already been referenced directly in the MCU, on the Disney+ streaming series Ms. Marvel. And as noted earlier, we’ve seen an X-Men member in the MCU previously, and will see plenty more in Deadpool 3.
So perhaps Deadpool 3 will bring the Fox version of the characters to a conclusion with a final crossover into the MCU multiverse saga that folds over into the mutants as they now exist in the MCU, allowing X-Men to reboot from scratch with an introduction in one of the next two Avengers films. I’d be on Secret Wars in this scenario, since it’s a great chance to have a new Xavier and team of young mutant students introduce themselves to the MCU world and help save the universe, setting up their first solo spinoff film in the aftermath of the Secret Wars.
The advantage of this approach is, it doesn’t require the X-Men or mutants to come from some alternate pre-existing dimension. Instead, it just presumes mutants’ pre-existed in the MCU already, and Xavier is now announcing this to the world with the debut of his X-Men. Mutants have been mentioned already, so they exist but are not widely known about — maybe Xavier helped suppress public awareness of mutants to give him time to prepare for the best moment, for example.
Regardless, this would be an in-universe introduction that doesn’t require an entire separate setup and plot-line for a multiverse explanation and crossover. And it would allow the Secret Wars story to include the MCU’s new X-Men facing some alternate universe version of themselves. Then again, there’s something neat and convenient to the notion of a pre-existing world of X-Men superheroes and mutants, with a pre-existing set of supervillains.
This raises an interesting “what-if” to consider: Marvel could’ve chosen in the aftermath of Avengers: Endgame to reboot the MCU with Fantastic Four and X-Men franchises as the foundations, since they are full of so many other characters and concepts (including The Inhumans, Silver Surfer, Galactus, Doctor Doom, Kang, and so on). On that powerful foundation of characters and stories they could launch Moon Knight, Shang-Chi, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Daredevil, and other characters in film and streaming projects to build up a whole new set of Marvel heroes, leading into Kang as the villain for a Multiverse Saga culminating in Avengers: The Kang Dynasty for the new MCU’s heroes. Then, use Avengers: Secret Wars to have the new MCU and the original MCU crash into one another, creating a brand new MCU that merges both universes and retcons some things together.
There’s an argument for doing a version of this now. The Fantastic Four in 2025 could be set in its own alternate universe outside of the MCU, where mutants are mentioned as pre-existing as a major social issue in that same alternate universe and the arrival of super-powered previously-mortal humans like the Fantastic Four is greeted with fanfare (in part due to reactionary prejudice and discrimination against mutants accused of wanting to “replace” the rest of humanity), and then introduce the X-Men alongside the Fantastic Four in 2026’s Avengers: The Kang Dynasty as part of a larger temporary team-up with the rest of the MCU.
This way, 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars can crash these different superhero worlds together, so they at first fight one another (akin to Captain America: Civil War but on a much larger scale) before finally working together to defeat Kang/Beyonder(s) (and maybe Doctor Doom if Kang leads into his introduction as an alternate version of Kang in the MCU). Perhaps this, then, is the plan, in which case we’d see the X-Men debut in Secret Wars, not after, so their solo movie would take place with a team audiences have already met in a big Avengers event film. Not a bad way to start.
There are many paths Marvel could take to introduce the X-Men into the MCU, be it the current existing version of the MCU, an alternate reality within the multiverse, or even simply waiting for the dust to settle from the Secret Wars and the new MCU to take shape before mutants and X-Men appear with a standalone origin introduction.
If development begins in early 2024, a script should be ready by mid- to late-summer once writers are hired and plans are finalized for how and when to work the mutant super-team into the MCU’s future vision. How much more the project develops, however, depends on how soon the studios make a deal with SAG-AFTRA and any other unions on strike by the time summer 2024 rolls around.
It might be a while before there’s more news on X-Men’s status, but it’s good to know the project is finally about to get moving, and we’ll have some idea as to the direction and perspective of the film once writers start meeting the studio. My guess at the moment is we’ll see a team of young teenage mutants and Xavier aka (Professor X) will be middle-aged or slightly younger, in a film I expect will be titled Uncanny X-Men (credit to Sean Gerber of MCU Fan Show podcast for being the first person I heard suggest this as the likely title and stick to it for all of these years), and am likewise expecting will feature the early-1990’s lineup popularized in the comics by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee.
Will Deadpool 3 tie up the former X-Men franchise for good, ahead of the reboot? Or will some threads and characters be left to linger in case Marvel wants to bring them back for more crossover and multiverse events? It will be a long time before we know for sure about most of this, but in whatever form, fans seemed thrilled to hear the X-Men are finally going to enter the MCU permanently.
