If you haven’t tuned into Marvel’s painstakingly long live stream revealing the cast of Avengers: Doomsday, you might not realize that some heavy hitters of Marvel movies past are returning to the big screen. Yeah, there are a handful of predictable MCU staples showing up, like Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Anthony Mackie as Captain America, as well as some more recent additions like Vanessa Kirby as Invisible Woman and Florence Pugh as Yelena, but the biggest surprise so far is that Doomsday is bringing back several actors from the Fox X-Men movies, including Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Professor X and Magneto.
Marvel is still rolling out the cast announcement as I write this, but, so far, the comic book company has confirmed that Stewart, McKellen, Kelsey Grammer (Beast), Alan Cumming (Nightcrawler), Rebecca Romijn (Mystique), and James Mardsen (Cyclops) are all reprising their roles in Doomsday. It’s unclear just how big a role the X-Men will play in the film, given Marvel still hasn’t properly integrated the mutant team into the cinematic universe yet, but even the actors that have been announced make it sound like the group itself will play a big role in whatever’s going on in the 2026 movie. Stewart and Grammer have both appeared in the MCU as multiverse variants of their characters. A version of Professor X showed up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as a founding member of the Illuminati, and Beast appeared in the post-credits scene of The Marvels. It’s unclear if the versions who show up in Doomsday will be the original characters from the X-Men films or if more multiverse shenanigans are afoot.
The MCU has been in a weird place after pivoting away from its planned Kang arc, so even with all these names, there’s not as much foreshadowing or connective tissue to speculate on as there was the last time the series did a big crossover event with Infinity War. I’m curious to see what Doomsday does to tie all these characters together when it hasn’t been given the same ramp-up because right now, this just seems like a recipe for cameo slop. I wonder how much money they had to pay Stewart and McKellen to come back. It’s gotta be some ungodly number, right?