Which Version of the X-Men Are in Avengers: Doomsday?

After several decades of teasing and incremental additions, it’s finally happening: the X-Men are coming into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, if the recent Avengers: Doomsday casting announcements from Marvel Studios are to be taken at face value, it isn’t as many might have expected. Instead of a new team of characters and actors, the MCU’s first X-Men team will include many returning members from the 20th Century Fox X-Men films of the early 2000s. Which begs the question: what version of the X-Men is this?

Cast members from the original Fox X-Men trilogy, such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn, and James Marsden, have all been announced as returning for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. However, the continuity of those X-Men films is anything but pristine. Eventually, they became so convoluted and difficult to keep track of that even the most ardent of fans admitted defeat, leaving modern audiences wondering how those characters will be incorporated in the MCU.

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The Mass Confusion of the Fox X-Men Timeline

As an example of these films’ confusion, consider the big-screen role of Cyclops, originated by James Marsden in the first X-Men movie. However, Cyclops was killed off-screen after what amounted to a cameo appearance in X-Men: The Last Stand. The character next appeared in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (not played by Marsden), where audiences saw his origin story. Cyclops then popped up again (once more played by Marsden) in a brief epilogue to X-Men: Days of Future Past several years later. But then, the sequel to that film, X-Men: Apocalypse, would feature a younger version of Cyclops (again, not played by Marsden or the other prior young Cyclops actor) getting another, different origin story.

If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is. However, it’s critical to note that there are some in-narrative justifications for parts of the timeline’s messiness. While all the X-Men films prior to Days of Future Past are meant to be one cohesive story, that culminating installment featured its fair share of time-travel and timeline-altering antics. As a result, it teed up the franchise to take things in new, uncharted directions. However, X-Men: Apocalypse squandered this opportunity and just reset the board. The result was that things were mostly the same. Hugh Jackman’s Logan, for example, is still experimented upon and turned into Weapon X. Yet, there were just enough baffling changes (somehow, Angel was now born several decades earlier) to make things even more confounding.

On top of all of this, no one seemed certain whether later additional films such as Deadpool, Logan, or even Dark Phoenix were supposed to all be set within alternate timelines from one another or the same one. Logan featured a storyline in which all the X-Men except for Logan and Professor X are dead. However, director James Mangold said that wasn’t necessarily reflective of where the mainline series would go. Deadpool 2 featured a gag in which Ryan Reynolds bemoans not being able to pay for any of the actual X-Men to be in the movie while he unknowingly stands in front of a room full of the X-Men: Apocalypse cast — all of whom are the younger ’80s-set versions of those characters, despite the fact that Deadpool 2 is set in present-day.

Marvel’s Desire to Milk Nostalgia

To say that the Fox X-Men timeline got muddled would be an understatement, but those original incarnations of these on-screen characters and their respective actors remain beloved to this day. Marvel Studios has had penchant for cashing in on nostalgia in recent years, from the appearance of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home to Chris Evans’ Human Torch and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine. It makes perfect sense that Avengers: Doomsday is opting to bring back these OG cast members.

Additionally, things got sour at the end of the franchise. Dark Phoenix was an unprecedented critical and financial disaster. With that in mind, it also makes sense that the MCU would sidestep those younger, more recent castings in favor of choices that are more tinted by the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia.

But which actual iteration of the X-Men will be showing up in Avengers: Doomsday? The smart money would be on Marvel looking to cherry-pick from the most favorably received era of the films, like they did with the returning characters in No Way Home. To this end, it would make the most creative sense to pull from the team as seen in X2: X-Men United. That film was the most well-received of the bunch and is still talked about as one of the great superhero sequels of all time. Plus, it includes all the OG cast members who are returning for Doomsday. By X-Men: The Last Stand, Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler, Rebecca Romijn’s Mystique, and James Marsden’s Cyclops have been removed from the story through death or depowerment. The Russo Brothers will likely avoid this period of the timeline altogether.

Streamlining the Old for Fan Service

Deadpool & Wolverine pulled a version of Hugh Jackman’s Logan from a separate timeline, and kept him vague enough to serve as a stand-in for the established movie version while also being more comfortably comic-accurate (i.e., wearing the costume). Marvel will likely do the same with the returning characters in Avengers: Doomsday. Given how much has changed in the superhero movie space since the early ’00s, Marvel will likely want the freedom to augment some of the character designs. They can embrace a more pulpy comic-book aesthetic for the characters while at the same time capitalizing on the nostalgia these versions of the characters hold.

The ultimate key to what audiences should expect from this version of the X-Men is most blatantly on display in a different multiversal MCU film: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. During that film’s Illuminati-centric setpiece, Patrick Stewart made his initial MCU debut, returning as Professor X. While he was recognizable, he was also in a more comic book-accurate, science-fiction-indebted wheelchair that the films had never featured before, and was welcomed onscreen by the playing of the title theme from X-Men: The Animated Series. Through these means, Marvel was able to cherry-pick fan-favorite elements from across the character’s history while still retaining the recognizable element of Patrick Stewart.

Expect the same thing from the roster of X-Men characters set to show up in Avengers: Doomsday. Considering how fractured and disparate the Fox X-Men timeline already was, it’s safe to say that Marvel probably isn’t too concerned about adhering to those films. Instead, it will likely simply use the returning cast as a launch pad to deliver nostalgic moments of fan service.

Avengers: Doomsday

Release Date

May 1, 2026

Director

Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Writers

Stephen McFeely

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  Vanessa Kirby

  Sue Storm / Invisible Woman

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  Joseph Quinn

  Johnny Storm / Human Torch

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  Ebon Moss-Bachrach

  Ben Grimm / The Thing

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  Pedro Pascal

  Reed Richards / Mr. Fantastic