Though fans have hoped the X-Men will show up in the MCU, that may not be so possible given the MCU’s solid five-year plan.
Once Disney pushes past Fox’s X-Men leftovers Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, a new take on the Uncanny X-Men will soon be on the horizon. With Disney finally having acquired the group of characters through the Fox-Disney merger, fans have been hopeful the X-Men would join Disney’s MCU as soon as possible — some even hoping they could get as much as a cameo in this month’s Avengers: Endgame.
Given the last-minute nature of that theory, that seems the least likely of possibilities. But anything could have been possible, given how little we knew about the X-Men’s integration up until now. Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, finally revealed more about when audiences could be reintroduced to the group in the MCU, and it looks like we may have to be patient.
In an interview with io9, Feige made it sound quite clear that Marvel Studios is sticking to its Phase Four plan. He revealed this, saying:
"It’s all just beginning and the five-year plan that we’ve been working on, we were working on before any of that was set. So really it’s much more, for us, less about specifics of when and where [the X-Men will appear] right now and more just the comfort factor and how nice it is that they’re home. That they’re all back. But it will be a very long time."
If Marvel decides to be completely rigid with its five-year plan and not change anything, then we’d have to wait until 2024 to see the MCU’s take on the X-Men. As we predicted before, based on Marvel’s slate of movies, it seemed like we could at least have had an X-Men film by 2021 or shortly after. But Marvel doesn’t give away all of its secrets, so there’s definitely more films in the works we don’t know about just yet that may fit into this five-year plan.
At the same time, Marvel’s secrecy about its movies might just mean they can find a way to fit in the X-Men without diverting too much from the original plan. For example, as io9 mentions, once Disney and Sony struck a deal for Spider-Man, he was introduced into the MCU via Captain America: Civil War pretty quick. For any movie still in the early stages of production, adding in one mutant wouldn’t hurt to slowly but surely usher in this team.
The big elephant in the room, though, would be figuring out what the X-Men had been up to during everything that’s gone down in the MCU so far. Has Professor Xavier always had his school open, even during the Battle of New York? Were the X-Men mid-battle with Magneto before being snapped away?
Marvel will hopefully start thinking about these answers now, because five years will fly by faster than Quicksilver can run. (Which, it’s so sad that we can’t get a proper mutant Quicksilver thanks to Avengers: Age of Ultron killing him off in one movie.)
You can get one of your final looks at Fox’s X-Men in Dark Phoenix, which is out in theaters on June 7. The New Mutants is slated to come out on August 2.