What Are We To Make of the X-Men Cast Revealed at D23?

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?

The film’s director Jake Schreier has gone on record saying he wants to take inspiration from Claremont and Hickman’s runs on X-Men. We’ve been hearing about this interpersonal, soap-opera like drama for a few months now. One of the film’s writers, Lee Sung Jin, even used the word "soapy" when describing the comics inspiring the film’s story.

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.