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Later-period Marvel movies have resorted to more fantastical plot devices such as parallel universes and time travel in an attempt to raise stakes in an increasingly complicated, superhero-populated cinematic universe. After Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a Marvel/Sony co-production that’s making a run at biggest-movie-of-all-time status, it feels as if those devices are making incursions into the real world and messing with the sacred timeline of superhero movies. Brand New Day has spurred speculation about the upcoming MCU reboot of the X-Men, seeded with the introduction of powerful telepath mutant Jean Grey (Sadie Sink). It’s like a reversed version of the early-century superhero boom, when the first X-Men movie became an unexpected smash in the summer of 2000, priming audiences for the record-shattering debut of the first Spider-Man two years later.
The only teasing of Spider-Man in the 2000 X-Men movie hid in the DVD’s blooper reel, featuring an outtake where someone (not Tobey Maguire) runs into the frame in full Spidey regalia, as a prank. At the time, there was no Marvel Studios making in-house movies; the company’s superheroes were at the mercy of whatever studio happened to license them. Fox had the X-Men, and parlayed them into a 20-year, 13-movie franchise. Meanwhile, Sony had Spider-Man, and made five of those (three with Maguire, two with Andrew Garfield) before striking a deal for the ascendant Marvel Studios to produce further installments within their MCU, while Sony retains the actual movie rights.
Now the X-Men are back with Marvel following Disney’s 2019 purchase of Fox. Coinciding as this did with the original series’ biggest flops (Dark Phoenix in 2019; The New Mutants, delayed into a pandemic casualty in 2020), there was little chance of those established movie versions, with their own bizarre continuity hiccups and time-travel paradoxes, being imported wholesale into the MCU. Marvel Studios has instead dabbled with them, reviving an iteration of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine through the dual magic of alternate timelines and shameless pandering and including some X-Men characters such as Cyclops (James Marsden), Beast (Kelsey Grammer) and Professor X (Patrick Stewart), in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.
Brand New Day, however, makes it more obvious that a clean X-Men reboot is on its way, now apparently scheduled for May 2028, directed by Jake Schreier of the MCU’s Thunderbolts. Sink’s high-profile in-movie casting announcement has been followed by several more traditionally disseminated bits of news: Samara Weaving will probably play Emma Frost, a mutant who has swapped sides between the X-Men and their enemies multiple times in the comics; Kit Connor has been reported as the “top choice” for Cyclops, the eye-blasting team leader who has been involved with both Emma and Jean in various comics. Disney hasn’t confirmed any of this beyond Sink; more concrete news is expected at the company’s D23 fan event this weekend.
Early casting indicates a more youthful take on the material than the original movies, where most of the leads were already full adults. The Fox series actually already tried a younger direction when they did a series of prequel movies starting with 2011’s X-Men: First Class; teenage versions of Cyclops, Jean, Nightcrawler and Storm were introduced in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse and then starred in the ill-fated Dark Phoenix.
Those movies were seen as two dysfunctional extremes for the previous series: the 80s-set Apocalypse, nominally directed by the erratic and since-disgraced Bryan Singer, is packed with period-appropriate excess in characters, costume, color and sometimes-dodgy visual effects. The 90s-set Dark Phoenix attempts to ground the characters in more serious drama and winds up feeling more like a dour postscript to the other prequels. Going by Schreier’s work on Thunderbolts, it would be fair to expect a group of mutants engaging in semi-comic bickering that’s informed by more relatable teen-to-twentysomething neuroses, easing into the soapier elements to this corner of Marvel. Don’t expect time travel, ancient Egypt, cosmic powers or other Advanced X-Men weirdness, at least not right away. Those elements all come into play on the current (and quite popular) X-Men 1997 cartoon, a continuation of a Saturday morning series from 30 years ago; though it may be tempting to draw from that popular series in live action, the MCU house style is more restrained, even when it goes cosmic. More likely, the new X-Men movies will (to some degree) emulate the Spider-Man series that introduces Jean: characters who are younger than the MCU average with interpersonal relationships that are as compelling as the more outsized threats they face.
The question is: age aside, how can Marvel keep this team movie distinguishable from, well, every other super-squad they’ve assembled over the years? The Avengers was a major-league novelty in 2012; as good as the first two X-Men movies are – and really, they still stand among the best of their genre – it’s arguable that the first two Avengers movies do an even better job of balancing out an ensemble of a half-dozen powers-boosted personalities, a formula with many subsequent variations, including upping the acrimonious absurdities (the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy), slimming down to a trio of heroes with wildly varied experience levels (The Marvels), focusing on characters with less heroic origins and backgrounds (Thunderbolts), dragging in characters from other universes (Deadpool & Wolverine), and calling every superhero character available an Avenger (Avengers: Endgame). For storytelling and budgetary reasons, the 2000 film simply titled X-Men feels positively spartan by comparison. It also has a directness and efficiency that make it still refreshing today.
A new X-Men movie, consciously or not, would be well-served by tapping into that sense of promise that radiated from the 2000 film, even if it has way more budgetary leeway to fill out its ensemble. That’s really the X-Men’s primary mission: re-ignite excitement in Marvel’s ability to offer (sort of) new characters rather than Doomsday’s seeming all-star leftovers approach. Of course, the old X-Men movies advantageously lacked any pre-existing cinematic-universe rules governing their adventures; it’s telling that the MCU has to engineer this huge Doomsday crossover just to make the introduction of the mutants make any sense.
The showcase factor might limit the characters further; as much as fans want to believe this will represent them finally done “right”, Fox’s efforts had a sense of blase freedom; hence the soft reboot of X-Men: First Class or the solo movies about Wolverine or Deadpool. Not every entry was great, and plenty of characters never got their due. But with Marvel tending to a whole universe while attempting to re-emphasize quality over quantity, it’s harder than ever to imagine the MCU producing anything as tightly focused as The Wolverine, a terrific stand-alone pulp thriller with Jackman’s title character involved in a Japanese crime story. For that matter, it’s hard to picture even later-period Marvel producing something as stylishly rococo and neon-accented as X-Men: Apocalypse. The original X-Men franchise had the luxury of feeling its way through the superhero boom and its own creative near-busts on its own terms.
That separateness sometimes rankled longtime fans, yet it also allowed the series as a whole to keep one foot in something resembling our world. The prequel movies playfully interact with 60s, 70s and 80s historical touchstones, however broadly, while two James Mangold-directed Wolverine movies utilize bits of the second world war past and an uncertain, dystopian future. It’s been almost a decade since the MCU interacted with any history that wasn’t an index of its own continuity. Tinkering with US history isn’t going to be job one for the new X-Men movie, and understandably so. (It wouldn’t be a bad thing for the movies to try dropping the reductive Martin Luther King/Malcolm X references from the Professor X/Magneto rivalry, for one thing.) But the new X-Men shouldn’t just function as Marvel’s age-defying time-warp shortcut to fan excitement. They offer an opportunity for the biggest movie series around to get out of its own head.
