X-Men and Tony Stark will be recast, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige reveals
"'Reboot' is a scary word," Feige told journalists while promoting "The Fantastic Four: First Steps."
By
Ryan Coleman
Published on July 20, 2025 11:46PM EDT
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The 'X-Men 2' cast included Patrick Stewart, Anna Paquin, James Marsden, Shawn Ashmore, Famke Janssen, Halle Berry, and Hugh Jackman.Credit:
20th Century Fox
Halle, Hugh, Robert — it's been a honor, but all good things must come to an end.
Following 2027's
Avengers: Secret Wars, several key characters in the MCU will be recast, including Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and the full team of
X-Men,
Marvel Studios president
Kevin Feige announced during a Friday press event,
Variety reported.
Feige said the company is "utilizing"
Secret Wars "not just to round out the stories we've been telling post-
Endgame, just as importantly — and you can look at the at the
Secret Wars comics for where that takes you — it very, very much sets us up for the future...
Endgame, literally, was about endings.
Secret Wars is about is about beginnings."
How Marvel finally got X-Men into the MCU with 'Avengers: Doomsday'
Cynthia Erivo wants to play Storm from 'X-Men': 'We haven't uncovered how grand she is'
Marvel has slowed the pace of MCU releases from the franchise's point of greatest saturation, the mid-to-late 2010s, in which three, even four films were released per year.
The company released only one film in 2024,
Deadpool & Wolverine, and though three are slated for this year —
Captain America: Brave New World and
Thunderbolts*, both previously released, and
The Fantastic Four: First Steps, coming next weekend — there's just one film apiece pegged to 2026 and 2027:
Avengers: Doomsday and
Avengers: Secret Wars.
Secret Wars represents a critical reorienting juncture for the franchise, Feige indicated, but hesitated to call it a reboot.
"'Reboot' is a scary word... Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people," he explained, describing the film instead as a "reset" for the MCU. "Reset, singular timeline — we're thinking along those lines."
'Iron Man 3' stars Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark.
Zade Rosenthal/Walt Disney Pictures/courtesy Everett
"X-Men is where that will happen next," he added.
It's no surprise that Feige is is pegging a "reset" to the X-Men, given the company's years-long effort to
buy the characters back from 21st Century Fox, which finally came to fruition in 2019 when Disney, Marvel's parent company,
acquired Fox.
In 2024, Feige teased "
a new age of mutants and of the X-Men," and this past March, Marvel finally announced that after a smattering of X-Men teases in MCU films — the original films' star
Kelsey Grammer appeared as Beast in
The Marvels, while
Patrick Stewart's Professor X showed up in
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness —
Avengers: Doomsday will officially mark the MCU's
first full showing of X-Men characters.
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Stewart,
Ian McKellen,
Alan Cumming,
Rebecca Romijn, and
James Marsden have all been confirmed to reprise their roles in the MCU.
Channing Tatum, who finally brought X-Men fan-favorite character Gambit to the big screen in
Deadpool & Wolverine, will also join them.
"There've been more X-Men movies than there were Spidey movies or Fantastic Four movies, so a lot has been done," Feige noted, while speaking at a recent
Fantastic Four roundtable,
ScreenRant reported. "But again, because it's almost a comic legacy unto itself, there's so much more to tap into it and there's so many sagas within sagas for X-Men."
'X-Men First Class' cast members Caleb Landry Jones, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, and Lucas Till.
20th Century Fox
The last time the
X-Men franchise saw a major cast overhaul was for 2011 prequel film
X-Men First Class. The new cast included
James McAvoy as Professor X,
Michael Fassbender as Magneto,
Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, and
Nicholas Hoult as Beast. Old then met new in 2014's
X-Men: Days of Future Past, in which
Hugh Jackman's Wolverine from the original films goes back in time to collaborate with the prequel films' stars, while the film cuts between the two timelines and their different casts, including
Halle Berry as Storm,
Anna Paquin as Rogue,
Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, among other stars of the original films.
X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016 and
Dark Phoenix in 2019 also starred the McAvoy- and Fassbender-led prequels cast, though the later films did not enjoy the same enthusiastic critical reception the first two films featuring the prequel cast did.
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