In the post-Avengers: Secret Wars MCU, the X-Men will be a priority for Marvel Studios. Introducing mutants in the current franchise is easier said than done, given that the rights to the characters only returned home in 2019. However, mutants will have likely always been part of this world when the franchise is softly rebooted.
That's going to give us an MCU with the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man all existing within the same space. It's an exciting prospect, and one we anticipate being a game-changer for Marvel's Merry Mutants.
While the 20th Century Fox-era X-Men will return in Avengers: Doomsday, work on the reboot is already underway. Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier is set to helm the movie, while Michael Lesslie, known for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, was tapped to write the screenplay last year.
In an update from Nexus Point News' @ApocHorseman, it's said that the X-Men script is currently being rewritten. We don't know who has been tasked with that job—it could be that Lesslie is taking another crack at it—but Schreier also worked with a different writer (Joanna Calo) to reshape Eric Pearson's Thunderbolts* script, remember.
The insider later shared updates on the casting process, revealing that Marvel Studios wants this X-Men team to be "much younger," with actors in their teens or early 20s. That's going to give them time to grow into these roles, likely playing the characters for the next decade or more.
Could we finally get the classic "first class" of X-Men, followed by the likes of Storm, Colossus, and Wolverine? Time will tell, though it has repeatedly been said that the MCU's roster will take its cues from the animated X-Men '97.
"There've been more X-Men movies than there were Spidey movies or Fantastic Four movies, so a lot has been done," Feige previously said. "But again, because it's because it's almost a comic legacy onto itself, there's so much more to tap into it and there's so many sagas within sagas for X-Men that that's part of what we're talking about now is which saga to grow and build to while doing the most important thing, which is introducing all of these characters and giving them their due in our first film."
"I'm not going to speak to the makeup of the characters that will be in the first movie, but look at Galactus, look at Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine, look at Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine," he continued. "We want to embrace that which was not embraced 25 years ago when I was around on those early X-Men movies, which is those comic-accurate looks."
Are you excited for Marvel Studios' X-Men reboot?