Did Alan Cumming Just Spoil A Big Avengers: Doomsday Fight?
Earth’s Mightiest Heroes don’t always see eye-to-eye with the X-Men.
Marvel Studios is pulling from every corner of its universe for its next big team-up, Avengers: Doomsday, and legacy actors are being roped in too. Fans of Fox’s X-Men saga got a pleasant surprise when a handful of characters joined the Doomsday cast: Sir Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen will reprise their roles as Professor X and Magneto, and they’ll be joined by fan favorites like Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique and Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler. It’s great to see them return, but it’s also a little unusual. The X-Men cast is a bit older than most of the Doomsday cast, something Cumming himself acknowleged.
“I was learning stunts yesterday for some fight scene, and I just think, I’m 60 years old. 23 years ago, I played that superhero,” the actor recently told Buzzfeed UK. Cumming admitted he was “kind of old for a superhero” even in 2003, when he first appeared as Nightcrawler in X2. “Now I’m back doing it. And that, to me, is hilarious.”
Doomsday is currently shooting in London and Atlanta, and though there’s plenty of buzz about the project, its plot has yet to be revealed. In his conversation with Buzzfeed, however, Cumming might have spoiled a key conflict for the crossover film, one that has little to do with its main villain, Doctor Doom, and everything to do with the two super-teams at the center.
Nightcrawler is reportedly facing off against a key Avenger in Doomsday.
It’s still early days for Doomsday’s production, which explains why Cumming is still learning fight choreography. The actor continued, “I’m sort of learning these fights and I’m like, ‘What? Who am I fighting with?’ And they said, ‘You’re hitting Pedro Pascal against the head,’ or something.”
Cumming could have been making up a hypothetical on the fly, but it’s just as likely that he teased a real Doomsday scene, thus revealing what could be a key part of its conflict. Pascal will reprise his role as Mister Fantastic, aka Reed Richards, in Doomsday, and his co-stars from The Fantastic Four: First Steps will be there too. It’s safe to assume they’ll be joining up with the Avengers, since that’s where their allegiance lies in the comics. And if Reed is trading blows with Nightcrawler, then the Avengers and the X-Men could be fighting each other before they face Doomsday’s Big Bad.
Nightcrawler vs. Mister Fantastic may be just the aperitif in a major conflict.
The Avengers and X-Men are two of Marvel’s most powerful and popular teams, but they’re not typically on the same page. Their disputes have fueled plenty of noteworthy comic book stories, with their biggest spat culminating in 2012’s Avengers vs. X-Men event. Here, it’s the reemergence of the Phoenix Force that divides the two super-teams, and fans have been waiting years to see a similar conflict unfold in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Again, there’s no telling how accurate Cumming’s comments are, but Doomsday could actually deliver a version of the comic by pitting Avengers against X-Men.
Maybe the teams will disagree about the best way to deal with the multiverse as parallel realities collide, or maybe they’ll be at odds about the rise of Doctor Doom. Either way, it’d make a lot of sense to pit these two forces against each other, because it’ll only make a potential team-up in Avengers: Secret Wars that much more exciting.
