Enrollment is underway at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Marvel Studios’ X-Men movie is reportedly casting lead roles, and the long-awaited reboot bringing the mutant team into the Marvel Cinematic Universe could begin filming in 2026 for a post-Avengers: Secret Wars release in late 2027. According to a report from Jeff Sneider in his newsletter The InSneider, Marvel is eyeing multiple rising stars for major roles in the first X-Men movie since Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019.
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The report states that the prospective first class of X-Men includes Harris Dickinson (The Iron Claw and Babygirl) as the optic blast-firing Scott Summers, a.k.a. Cyclops; Sadie Sink (Stranger Things and The Whale) as the telepath Jean Grey; and Julia Butters (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and The Gray Man) as phasing mutant Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat.
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Sneider, noting that no deals have been signed, says that casting depends on several X-factors like pay, scheduling, and “how large a commitment Marvel is seeking from each of these young actors.” (Dickinson is the reported frontrunner to portray John Lennon in the four-part Beatles biopics by Sam Mendes, which are all slated for release in 2027.)
In May 2024, it was reported Marvel tapped The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes screenwriter Michael Lesslie to pen the X-Men reboot, but the studio has yet to announce a director — an announcement that could come as CinemaCon in the spring or San Diego Comic-Con in July.
Marvel’s X-Men movie doesn’t have a release date, but Disney earmarked dates for four untitled Marvel movies: July 23, 2027, and Feb. 18, May 5, and Nov. 10, 2028. According to Sneider, it’s likely X-Men is the July 2027 film following Avengers: Secret Wars (May 7, 2027), which is being directed by Anthony and Joe Russo as the end of Phase 6 and the final film of the Multiverse Saga.
It’s possible that the MCU X-Men first appear in either Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars, similar to how the Russo brothers-directed Captain America: Civil War marked the debuts of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker and Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa ahead of their solo movies, 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and 2018’s Black Panther.
Marvel Studios has slowly integrated mutants into the MCU following the Fox acquisition in 2019. The 2022 Disney+ series Ms. Marvel revealed that Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan is a mutant, and mutants featured in the films Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda. The former saw Patrick Stewart, star of the Fox-made X-Men franchise, reprise his role as Professor Charles Xavier, while the latter introduced Tenoch Huerta as the mutant Namor the Sub-Mariner.
Kelsey Grammer returned as Beast in a post-credits sequence ending 2023’s The Marvels, and Hugh Jackman, who played Logan/Wolverine in nine X-Men movies between 2000 and 2017, returned as the metal-clawed mutant opposite Ryan Reynolds in last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine. 2024 also marked the debut of the first X-Men project produced by Marvel Studios: the Disney+ animated series X-Men ’97.
Marvel Studios president and producer Kevin Feige has been teasing the MCU’s “Mutant era” since Deadpool & Wolverine sent off the era of Fox-made Marvel movies spanning 2000’s X-Men through 2019’s Dark Phoenix. “[Deadpool & Wolverine] is the beginning of that, and every [movie] post-Deadpool & Wolverine will be the Mutant era coming into the MCU,” Feige said last year, saying elsewhere that “the whole story of Secret Wars really leads us into a new age of mutants and of the X-Men.”
Feige later told Gizmodo that Marvel’s X-Men movie would feature a mixture of major and lesser-known mutants.
“It’s that phrase we use often at Marvel, which is ‘It’s an embarrassment of riches,’” Feige said. “And there are a lot of great X-Men characters in the Deadpool & Wolverine film. There are a lot of great X-Men characters in all of the Fox versions of the X-Men films. And there are a lot of great X-Men characters that have never gone on the big screen. So I think as we always try to do, as we did when we made the arrangement with Sony for Spider-Man, you’ll probably see a mix of characters you’ve seen before and characters you’ve never seen before.”
