Deadpool & Wolverine is the beginning of the “Mutant era” of the MCU, that’s what Marvel’s Kevin Feige himself has promised. Even so, while it brings back so many familiar faces from Fox’s defunct franchise, we’re still a ways from meeting a rebooted team of X-Men hailing from the mainstream Marvel universe.
And yet they are on their way. In May 2024, the studio officially hired screenwriter Michael Lesslie (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) to assemble the script for the confirmed reboot movie based around Professor X’s superpowered students. It’s still early days, then, but it’s definitely happening. With the screenplay in the works, we’re even hearing tell of some of the mutants who may end up serving on the MCU’s founding X-Men roster. The operative word being “may.”
The MCU’s X-Men rumored to feature these three iconic mutants
According to scooper @MyTimeToShineHello, Marvel’s X-Men reboot will contain the following three beloved mutants from the comics and prior movies in its cast: Angel, Iceman, and Jubilee.
Anyone with a degree in X-Men-ology should know those characters by name. Angel aka Warren Worthington III made his live-action debut in X-Men: The Last Stand, as played by Ben Foster, before Ben Hardy took over the role for X-Men: Apocalypse. While Angel was only a supporting player in both of those, he is a founding member of the X-Men in the comics, so Marvel restoring his importance to the team would make sense.
Iceman was a frequent presence in Fox’s films, with Shawn Ashmore’s Bobby Drake serving as a teenage character and the love interest of Anna Paquin’s Rogue. After appearing all three films in the original trilogy, he was last seen in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Like Angel, though, he is another founding member of the team from the comics whose significance was lessened in the films. It’s worth noting that Bobby is also gay in the source material, so it remains to be seen if his sexuality is something Marvel is interested in exploring.
Last but not least, Jubilee is not a founding X-Man in the comics, with the character’s popularity particularly exploding (like a firework) in the 1990s, thanks to X-Men: The Animated Series. Sadly, she was always underserved by Fox, with the perfectly cast Lana Condor reduced to a mere cameo in Apocalypse. After her major role in X-Men ’97, the benefits of Marvel using her as the audience identification figure for its upcoming reboot are obvious.
All that being said, this is of course just a rumor. In fact, it clashes with another rumored MCU X-Men roster we’ve already heard, which claimed Marvel was simply borrowing the team from X-Men ’97 wholesale. While that Disney Plus series was practically flawless, for the sake of creativity, it probably would be best to shake things up for the movie, bringing in a mix of heroes popular from both the comics and animation. As well as those Fox was never really able to get right.
With Deadpool & Wolverine bringing us closer than ever before to the not-so-distant future of the franchise, any trickle of intel on the X-Men reboot — provided we don’t take it as gospel — is appreciated as it reminds us of the excitement we have ahead of us. As Patrick Stewart might say, mutation is the key to the MCU’s survival.