Marvel Studios Producer Says X-Men Name Is “Outdated”

Marvel Studios EVP of Production Victoria Alonso believes the name "X-Men" is "outdated."

"I don't know where the future is going," Alonso told Nuke the Fridge when promoting the Captain Marvel home release. "It's funny that people call it the X-Men. There's a lot of female superheroes in that X-Men group, so I think it's outdated."

Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) in Dark Phoenix would agree: "The women are always saving the men around here," she snarls during a terse confrontation with Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). "You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women."

Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) earlier called out the "blatant sexism" behind the team's name in Deadpool 2, where he quipped his "forward-thinking" and "gender neutral" mostly mutant team would be called "X-Force."

But "X-Men" is expected to remain in place when Disney-owned Marvel Studios relaunches the franchise under chief Kevin Feige following Disney's $71.3 billion acquisition of Fox.

"I don't know where it's going to go," admitted Alonso, who acted as producer on Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. "We'll see. They just now have joined [the Marvel Cinematic Universe]. They actually have a movie coming out very soon, which is under [the Fox] banner. It's their last film. We'll see. Time will tell."

Feige has only said the reboot is still years away, telling io9 in April "it'll be a while" before the X-Men join the MCU proper.

"It's all just beginning and the five-year plan that we've been working on, we were working on before any of that was set," Feige said. "So really it's much more, for us, less about specifics of when and where [the X-Men will appear] right now and more just the comfort factor and how nice it is that they're home. That they're all back. But it will be a very long time."

Dark Phoenix opens Thursday.