Disney's 2019 $71bn purchase of 20th Century Fox returned X-Men rights to Marvel, enabling potential MCU integration. The timing and method for introducing Jean Grey, Cyclops and other mutants into Earth-616 remain unresolved. Thunderbolts director Jake Schreier calls the X-Men reboot an incredible opportunity and expects complex identity-driven character conflict, while noting a release is unlikely before 2028. Screenwriters face a significant continuity problem explaining how younger mutants missed major MCU events such as the Battle of New York, Ultron and Thanos. Industry reports suggest Marvel plans a new generation of younger X-Men, prompting narrative and temporal questions about their absence.
The news this week that the X-Men are finally heading to the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been predicted ever since Disney's $71bn buyout of 20th Century Fox in 2019, when every comic book mutant back to Apocalypse suddenly became available to Kevin Feige and Marvel. But it remains to be seen when and how Jean Grey, Cyclops et al will finally make landfall on Earth-616, especially since nobody has yet explained how Marvel plans to smuggle them into a timeline that has spent the best part of two decades blissfully ignoring their existence.
In an interview with Empire magazine, Thunderbolts* director, Jake Schreier, describes the chance to oversee the X-Men reboot which is unlikely to land before 2028 as an incredible opportunity with super interesting characters and internal conflict, adding: These characters are wrestling with their identity and place in the world that's inherently interesting and complex material. Which, of course, is the usual guff film-makers blurt out when trying to reassure fans that they're taking the project seriously, but tells us zilch about how it is all going to pan out.
The big problem for anyone trying to suddenly introduce mutants into the MCU is that screenwriters can't magic up a 20-year-old Cyclops without explaining how he somehow missed the Battle of New York, the Ultron incident and Thanos's big midlife crisis. Industry reports suggest that Marvel wants to introduce a new generation of younger X-Men, which means that unless something really interesting (and possibly narratively dysfunctional) is going on, they would have been born around the time Tony Stark was still cheerfully selling weapons to failed states, a couple of years before 2008's Iron Man kicked off the whole MCU circus. So where have all these X-babies been all this time?
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