The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had its many heads swirling in the mass confusion of a multiverse for the last few years. This, thank god, is soon coming to an end. MCU boss Kevin Feige has described the forthcoming abandoning of interweaving timelines as a “reset.” But definitely not a “reboot.”
This is all centered around the proper arrival, in about three years’ time, of the X-Men into the MCU, an arrival which we’ve now learned will not feature any of the recent spate of former X-Men actors whose cameos have littered the latest movies and TV shows. So while it will be the old guard of mutants who show up for 2027's Avengers: Secret Wars, after that they’re off. Instead, according to Variety, the 2028-or-later X-Men movie to be directed by Jake Schreier (who also directed Thunderbolts*) will feature an all-new cast playing the iconic comic book heroes. And that might stretch even further, to new actors playing long-established superheroes in the MCU mythos, too. I say: thank you, thank you.
OK, bear with me. Phases 4, 5 and 6 of the MCU have been called The Multiverse Saga, and have involved multiple versions of reality crashing into one another. This has taken place across Disney+ TV series like Loki, and movies like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Deadpool & Wolverine, and has led to the brief appearances of a whole bunch of actors who played X-Men characters in the previous Fox-created franchise of movies that ran from 2000 to 2019.
In 2017, Disney bought Fox, which allowed decades of licensing conflicts to go away, freeing up familiar mutants to show up in MCU movies, but it’s all been so incredibly piecemeal that it’s been tough to follow. This, we’re told, is all building up to the end of Phase 6, a pair of Avengers movies—Doomsday and Secret Wars—that will finally close the multiverse saga and let us all move on.
See, so much of the trouble with the current era of the MCU is that even trying to write out what’s happening is a nightmare of overlapping movies, TV series and references to entire other franchises from the past. No wonder audiences are tiring of the films, given the amount of background research you need to do to have the faintest idea what’s going on.
Yes, it’s absolutely led to the fantastic fun of films like the aforementioned Spider-Man and Doctor Strange outings, but it’s the consequences of these movies that are such a headache. The thrill of characters from multiple universes and franchises meeting up on screen is great while you’re sat in your seat, but needing to remember who was in which and why for next time isn’t what going to the movie theater should be about. Thankfully, there’s only two years of it left.
After that, in what has yet to be called Phase 7, Feige is promising that the MCU will match the move made by the comics in 2015's papery version of Secret Wars, and collapse all these bloody timelines into one. In this process, we’ll say goodbye to the likes of Kelsey Grammer, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn and James Marsden, who will presumably be cast off into the ether, and we’ll get a completely new, fresh team of X-Men actors.
“We’re utilizing [Secret Wars] not just to round out the stories we’ve been telling post-Endgame,” Feige said at a press briefing this weekend, “[but] it very, very much sets us up for the future.” Endgame, the final movie in Phase 3, was about endings, he said, adding, “Secret Wars is about beginnings.”
When asked if this is a reboot, Feige was very careful to distance himself from the concept. “Reboot is a scary word,” he told reporters. “Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Reset, singular timeline—were thinking along those lines.”
Feige will want to avoid the notion of “reboot” because it would suggest scrapping all that’s come before and starting fresh, which isn’t the plan. It seems it’s more about, as he says, a reset: letting things calm back down before introducing the superheroic world to mutants. This, he notes, should give the movies a chance to also dramatically lower the age of their casts.
Remember, the MCU began in 2008, a frightening 17 years ago, meaning what were once fresh-faced actors are now very much middle-aged. In order not to age out, the movies will quickly need a younger audience, and since X-Men stories lend themselves to teenage and 20-something characters discovering their powers, this is a great chance to hire some of the most audience-attracting younger actors working today, who would have been very young indeed when the first Iron Man was released.
According to Feige, this recasting isn’t going to stop at the X-Men. He even suggested—while referencing James Bond as evidence that it’s possible—that characters like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers could be recast. And, as weird and unlikely as that might sound, if the movies are to continue on for generations, it’s unavoidable.
Sure, Marvel comics have a squillion heroes that the MCU has never gone near. The issue is, few have broad enough recognition to hold up a movie, and as James Gunn is about to discover in the DCU, you have to do a hell of a lot of work to convince an audience to show up for a superhero they’ve never seen on a t-shirt. On the other hand, if you stick to the big names, you can’t have your core characters played by men in their 50s and 60s. Robert Downey Jr. just turned 60. Mark Ruffalo (Hulk) is 57. Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) is 54. Even the babies like Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are now in their 40s. And yes, of course I’d love to see the MCU’s equivalent of The Watchmen, but the reality is that if you want to keep banking on these most popular heroes, you’ll have to recast the roles.
This could suggest some really dramatic implications for the climax of Secret Wars. It’s obvious to assume that this “reset” would bring us back to what we already know, the Earth-616 where we started before it all got out of control. But what if that’s not the plan? What if the timeline that survives is a completely fresh one, perhaps the one in which this month’s Fantastic Four: First Steps is set? Or an entirely new Earth, which has never seen a Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man or Chris Hemsworth Thor?
I’d take it. While that’s a lot closer to a “reboot,” and those can be exhausting too (we all have to do the mental gymnastics of already knowing everything while the characters know nothing), it’d be so great not having to try to remember 20 years of backstory, including which character cameoed in which episode of a TV series five years earlier in order to understand why that woman wants to kill that guy in this movie...Yeah, I’ll take a reset.
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