X-Men MCU Movie Release Date Rumor Ties Directly to Avengers: Secret Wars
According to a reliable insider, the X-Men are coming soon to the MCU, right around the time of a major Avengers movie...
On the other, it’s a good sign that they’re making Kitty a priority. Introduced as a plucky 13-year-old in 1980’s Uncanny X-Men #129, Kitty soon became the ideal audience surrogate. Even when writer Chris Claremont put her at the center of some misjudged moments (more than once, Claremont had Kitty use real-world slurs to point out the prejudice launched at mutants), Kitty remained the perfect example of a person whose life was turned upside down by the sudden arrival of her powers. Before Jubilee on the ’90s cartoon or Rogue in the Fox movies, Kitty served as Wolverine’s charge and big sister to younger mutants.
By starting with Kitty, it seems that Disney’s looking for a way to ease viewers into the very lore-heavy world of the X-Men, which is notable. After all, we have already seen mutants in the MCU, and not just little winks like the tease in the Ms. Marvel finale or an off-hand comment about Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
The aforementioned Hugh Jackman appeared as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine, joined by Channing Tatum as Gambit. Kelsey Grammer reprised his role as Beast in The Marvels and Patrick Stewart showed up as Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. But these are all refugees from the Fox Universe, which isn’t dead, but is sequestered after the end of Deadpool & Wolverine.
That multiversal division highlights another interesting part of Sneider’s report. If X-Men releases in 2027, then it comes the same year as Avengers: Secret Wars. Although it seems likely that Secret Wars will adapt the 2015 Marvel Comics crossover by the same name, it’s not entirely clear how that will look on screen. Less substantial rumors had suggested that the film will involve even more multiversal variants, including Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man and Nicholas Cage’s Ghost Rider, joining together to fight Doctor Doom, played by Robert Downey Jr.
If that’s the case, then the X-Men we meet in the undoubtedly nostalgic Secret Wars might mostly come from the Fox movies, just transposed from an alternate reality. However, the Secret Wars comic book ends with the creation of a new Marvel Universe, which could also influence the MCU’s future, including what mutantdom looks like on screen after the finale of Phase 6.
Might Avengers: Secret Wars end with an essentially rebooted Earth, one in which the general public isn’t quite so used to people with superpowers as they are in the current version of the MCU? And if random people just started gaining powers when they hit puberty, might the general public fear and hate those people, those mutants?