Avengers: Doomsday Confirms X-Men Crossover With Several Key Legacy Actors
Worlds collide.
After years of speculation and a few dips into the multiverse, the MCU world of the Avengers is finally fully crossing over with the mutants of the X-Men. But while many fans have expected several popular X-Men characters to be fully rebooted and recast, the big reveal for Avengers: Doomsday is that it appears the MCU will fully crossover not with new X-Men actors, but with very famous, and very beloved X-Men actors.
In the ongoing cast-reveal livestream, Marvel confirmed that several legacy X-Men actors including Kelsey Grammer, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, James Marsden, and Rebecca Romijn are all part of the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, indicating that the characters of Hank “Beast” McCoy, Professor Charles Xavier, Magneto, Nightcrawler, Cyclops and Mystique will appear in the MCU proper. Interestingly, Channing Tatum, who never appeared in the original Fox X-Men films, was also confirmed to be in the film, after making his debut as Gambit — in a meta joke about his never-made movie — in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Now technically, this isn’t the first time Professor X and Beast have appeared in the MCU. Stewart cameoed as a variant of Charles Xavier in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness in 2022, while Grammer appeared as Beast in The Marvels in 2023. However, no version of Magneto — played by McKellen or Michael Fassbender — has appeared in live action outside of the 20th Century Fox X-Men films. Ditto Mystique, Cyclops, and Nightcrawler.
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart at the premiere of X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014.
More broadly, the prominent inclusion of these various “legacy” actors from the X-Men franchise seems to indicate that the multiverse action in Avengers: Doomsday may attempt to reconcile some of the continuity of the Fox X-Men films into the timeline and canon of the MCU. Interestingly enough, we’ve seen Professor X (as played by Stewart) perish three times already in different films. He bites the dust in X-Men: The Last Stand, Logan, and in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so hopefully, he’ll survive the events of Doomsday.
Stewart, McKellen, and Romijn are also, in some ways, foundational to the success of Marvel movies in general. In the year 2000, X-Men became the first major superhero movie of the century, well before the MCU became a thing and even before the blockbuster hit of Spider-Man in 2002. So, in rebooting the MCU’s status quo, it seems that Marvel is going back to the beginning of what makes superhero team-up movies tick.
While Deadpool & Wolverine included plenty of X-Men connections to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having this many of the original cinematic X-Men in an Avengers movie is taking this crossover to the next level. Fans have been wanting the X-Men in the MCU, but nobody ever expected it would look like this.
