Milbury is one of the many aliases used by the man who would become Mister Sinister. While this could be Marvel's way of playing coy with the identity of the movie's big bad, there may be considerably more to this iteration of the character than meets the eye.
This article is chock full of interesting info on Mr. Sinister. There’s some great comics depth there. One of the things that caught my eye was the connections Wilding drew to the Hellfire Club.
Driver was rumoured to be up for the role of Sebastian Shaw, but what if Milbury is connected to the MCU's Hellfire Club? When Essex encountered Apocalypse in the Victorian era, he took him to the Hellfire Club, hoping the influential secret society might take his theories about evolution seriously. With Emma Frost, a.k.a. the White Queen in this movie, that organisation could come into play.
I have been thinking about Emma's role in the film, too, and a potential encounter with the Hellfire Club. I didn't know about Sinister's relationship to the group. That connection makes me think this take might be correct.
Emma Frost has to be a villain in her MCU X-Men introduction, right? Maybe she and Sinister are a fledgling version of the Hellfire Club. There could also be hints to a longer history for the villainous organization. With this good looking cast, we might even get a version of the Hellfire Gala. As popular as the Krakoa Age of the comics has been, it wouldn’t surprise me to see at least some nod to that recent era in the comics.
“I thought I’d been fired after Infinity War, and I got pulled into the office by [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige], in London. I walked in and I was very British about the whole thing. I just wanted everybody to feel uncomfortable,” he says in the Entertainment Weekly/PEOPLE interview suite.
And now here we are with Bettany as Vision headlining the latest series in a Wanda and Vision trilogy. It's not confirmed, but I would be shocked if Wanda and Vision don't show up somehow in Avengers: Doomsday. Maybe Bettany will join Hugh Jackman and be playing his character in the MCU until he's 90.
Everything in comics comes down to Marvel vs. DC eventually. DC’s Absolute line of comics has clearly been the hottest thing in comics this year. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say the new Hickman-lead Midnight line is trying to emulate the Absolute line, but they’re clearly launching this at Marvel aware of the comparison.
"The danger of big two comics is that it's a monthly periodical that just goes on forever, right? And the danger is that you just sell the same comics over and over again forever. So sometimes there has to be a big shake-up. There has to be some kind of big change to make the comics look more like the world people live in. or to change the status quo drastically," Johnson says in an interview with Cryptid Creator Corner. "And I can say, as a reader, I've never seen Marvel change the status quo more in a book than we're doing here. What we're doing here makes Ultimate and honestly Absolute too look pretty polite."
Following her intergalactic adventures as Phoenix, Jean Grey returns to Earth this November in JEAN GREY #1, the start of a five-issue limited series from X-Men (2024) writer Jed MacKay and acclaimed artist Rogê Antônio, known for his recent work on Cyclops (2026). Announced earlier today in AIPT Comics' X-Men Monday column, the series comes hot on the heels of DNX, the upcoming X-Men and Fantastic Four crossover from MacKay and artist Federico Vicentini.
There’s a lot of Jean Grey going around lately. Here’s hoping the MCU version isn’t awash in the Phoenix Force like her current comics counterpart.
The latest expansion for the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game hits stores today! Secret Wars is based upon the 1984 limited series that spawned Marvel’s company-wide crossovers, and upon the 2015 limited series that’s the basis of the storyline for the next two Avengers movies. It’s packed with new rules, new ways to run a campaign, and a chapter that explains in detail how the Marvel Multiverse — and its many universes and cosmoses — actually work.
I’ve been a fan of this game since it launched. I’m saying this as someone who has never been a TTRPG fan. I always loved watching actual plays, sure, but I’ve never wanted to play one myself. That is, until the Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game.
If you’re a Marvel fan and not playing the Marvel Multiverse RPG Game, you’re missing out. It’s an easy system to learn, easy to play with friends. It feels great running around in your own corner of the Marvel Universe.
Check out this game and the expansions! I’ll definitely get a copy of the Secret Wars expansion when I head to my local comic shop tomorrow.
Although Disney Cursed Love sounds like what happens when a Disney adult goes on Hinge, it’s actually a new initiative featuring some of Disney’s most iconic love stories. The possibilities are endless, but the first story features Belle and the Beast, so cursed love indeed – however they have a very different look from traditional Disney animation for the webtoon version.
I get why this didn’t make the cut for Friday night’s entertainment showcase.
I heard the news early yesterday morning that Hayden Panettiere had passed away. It was shocking news. Her demons were well covered, but still, she was a bright light of an actor, gone too soon.
Like many comics nerds, I was a huge fan of Heroes when it premiered in the fall of 2006. Marvel and particularly the X-Men were clearly inspiration for the show. Watching that first season was an almost magical experience, the story unfolding in an ever-widening circle of characters and conspiracies, everyone racing to save the world from potential destruction. It was a classic super hero tale on network TV, with a classic tagline.
The timing on this one! I mentioned pacing issues in my review of Miles Morales: Spider-Man #1, and then this morning, I’m catching up on episodes of Off Panel when this related gem of writerly wisdom from Kelly Sue DeConnick suddenly goes by.
It's “not all the cast,” as Kevin Feige phrased it Friday night, but we now have our X-Men. At least some of them. What does this glimpse into the X-Men say about what we’re building toward in the MCU? There are some obvious take aways.
A younger, good looking cast
Clearly, we’re getting a younger version of the X-Men in the MCU. This is a good looking cast, too. Hmmmmm. What drama unfolds when you have a bunch of good looking, younger X-Men?
Love triangles between Scott, Jean, and Emma? Maybe.
Late teen/early 20s angst as characters come into their own? Almost certainly.
Overlap with X-Men ’97 characters
Anyone else notice the overlap between this cast and the roster for X-Men ’97? For now, we have a near 1 for 1 match. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it as we say here in the south. It seems clear that Marvel is casting fan favorite characters.
There are some omissions. No Magneto yet. No Wolverine. No Gambit. Are these intentional misses or just gaps in the casting so far? When we see the full cast announced, we’ll get a better sense of how close to the animated series this cast will stick.
Anchored by Sadie Sink
The casting of Sadie Sink as Jean Grey is really interesting to me. She’s the most well-known actor here. The rest are relatively unknowns. It doesn’t seem a stretch to think of Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey as the anchor of the film.
She’s the heavy weight in the list of X-Men actors, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day acts as on-ramp to this film. Does that mean we’ll get a Jean Grey centered film? I don’t know if I would go that far just yet, but clearly, Sink is the star. Jean Grey has all our attention.
It’s also interesting to me that Claremont’s 80s run on X-Men comics is inspiration for this film, and Sink has that 80s connection with Stranger Things. The X-Men film has to be set in our modern day, given current timelines and Jean Grey’s role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But still, there’s an 80s connection there I find interesting.
Not sure what, if anything, we should make of that just yet.
A Sinister Villain
Alongside Sink's Jean Grey we're getting Adam Driver as Mr. Sinister. Sink might be the big name among the X-Men actors, but Driver is a huge casting get and will loom large as the film's villain. I take both the casting of Driver and the choice of Mr. Sinister to mean this film will be dealing with themes like fascism and genocide.
Mr. Sinister is the mutant equivalent of a mad Nazi scientist. It's not hard to see the cultural relevance and themes at play here.
Other things I’m curious about
This will be our first American Professor X. That’s new. I’m curious to see how that plays onscreen and in the story.
We also don’t have much in the way of international characters here except for Storm. I wouldn’t expect the Sh’iar or space-faring teams either, given all the talk about a more grounded X-Men film.
All of this leaves me curious about the range of this story.
5.5.28 — Coming Soon
There’s a lot of directions this film could go, but we do have some sense of its core now. It’s a younger, character-driven version of the X-Men with a bit of a soap opera feel. It’s likely anchored on Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey, with a heavy-weight villain in Adam Driver’s Mr. Sinister. It’s trying for new ground in the MCU, while also focusing on the most popular X-Men characters.
After Disney bought Fox, it seemed like we would never get an X-Men film. Now we have a cast and a release date. I expect things to move quickly from here, each of us living with the feels of this X-Men film coming soon.
