With the Avengers: Doomsday call sheet already bursting at the seams with Marvel stars of the past and present, the official rewatch guidance ahead of the movie’s upcoming premiere strongly suggests the returning members of the X-Men legacy cast will have a very specific role to play. If my theory is correct, then the mutants we see in Doomsday will be both nostalgically familiar and also iterations of the characters that we’ve never actually seen before.
Although the cast for the new X-Men reboot was announced at D23 over the weekend, Doomsday is giving us at least one more chance to see the old guard in action. I’d be surprised if we didn’t also see Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and company in Avengers: Secret Wars next year as well, although there is currently far less information about that movie right now. However, the Marvel projects that have been announced as recommended viewing ahead of Doomsday mean the fifth Avengers movie won’t simply be checking in with the original X-Men cast. It also seems that they’ll have their shared past drastically altered.
‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ Isn’t on Marvel’s Official ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Prep List
Fox’s X-Men movies exist in a deceptively complex multiverse of their own, as the prequels starring younger versions of the characters ultimately retconned themselves into a new timeline. However, the original trilogy, released between 2000 and 2006, still works as a set of three movies that can be watched back-to-back. Marvel has included 2000’s X-Men and 2003’s X2 in the list of recommended rewatches before Doomsday, but 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, which rounded out the trilogy, is not mentioned.
The only other X-Men movie on the list is 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, but that has almost definitely been included for other reasons, considering that the variant of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in that film never actually appeared in the original trilogy. At the very least, he comes from a timeline that diverged at some point from the one we saw in those three movies. The absence of The Last Stand from the recommended viewing list ahead of Doomsday is something I immediately noticed, and I think it could come with some major connotations for the upcoming Avengers movie.
What ‘The Last Stand’s Absence Means for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’s Returning ‘X-Men’ Characters
In short, it seems very much like X-Men: The Last Stand never happened, at least for the X-Men we’ll see in Avengers: Doomsday. If those events were experienced by Cyclops (James Marsden) and the other returning X-Men, then they are likely to have happened very differently. In other words, there now seems to have been a new timeline that branched off after X2, and this new reality is where the X-Men in Doomsday are from.
For those who don’t remember, The Last Stand ends with the X-Men taking down Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his Brotherhood of Mutants, who are launching an attack on the facility that’s developed a “cure,” which removes a mutant’s superhuman abilities and makes them fully human. Magneto is stripped of his power via said “cure,” and Jean (Famke Janssen) is killed by Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) after she becomes the Phoenix. Professor X, who dies quite early on in the movie, is teased to be on the cusp of a psychic resurrection via the body of his brother. Perhaps the biggest thing to take away is that the mutant cure is still available, so humanity probably feels more comfortable about controlling mutants, should the need arise, in the wake of Magneto’s loss.
Because this movie isn’t included in Marvel’s pre-Doomsday watchlist, it suggests a different ending to this conflict has since occurred off-screen, potentially one where Magneto succeeded in destroying the facility with his allies. This Magneto, with his powers still intact, could be the one in Avengers: Doomsday, and Professor X is also likely to have avoided being killed by Jean. Most interestingly, it stands to reason that humanity would come up with an alternative method of keeping mutants in check, given that the cure would have been destroyed if Magneto had been successful in his goal of destroying the facility where it was made.
A common way the comics pull off this control of mutants is by introducing the Sentinels, towering mutant-killing machines that have been used surprisingly sparingly in live-action. We have already seen Cyclops in despair with Sentinels walking around in the background in an earlier Avengers: Doomsday teaser (above), which lends even more credence to the possibility that the last time we saw these exact characters was actually in X2, not The Last Stand.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
