Marvel Studios closed the Disney Entertainment Showcase at D23 on Friday night by answering the question the fandom has been asking since Disney bought Fox in 2019. The X-Men cast is official, it is almost entirely new faces, and it arrives with a hard release date attached.
Here is every name confirmed, who they are playing, and what the reveal tells us about Marvel’s next decade.
The full X-Men cast
Kevin Feige brought director Jake Schreier on stage alongside Sadie Sink to unveil the lineup, along with a new logo for the film.
- Sadie Sink as Jean Grey
- Kit Connor as Scott Summers, better known as Cyclops
- Christopher Abbott as Professor Charles Xavier
- Samara Weaving as Emma Frost
- Inde Navarrette as Rogue
- Maya Boyd as Storm
- Adam Driver as Nathaniel Milbury
The film is still officially untitled. Jake Schreier, who directed Thunderbolts, is behind the camera, and Marvel has it dated for May 5, 2028.
Sadie Sink was already in the MCU
This is the part casual viewers missed. Sink did not get announced cold at D23. She made her debut as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which opened on July 31 and is currently the highest grossing film of the year.
Marvel seeded a mutant into a Spider-Man movie two weeks before revealing the X-Men cast that surrounds her. That is a level of planning the studio has not shown in a while, and it is worth noting after a stretch where the connective tissue between MCU projects felt improvised. Our Brand New Day trailer breakdown covered what that film was setting up.
Adam Driver is playing Mister Sinister
Driver appeared by video rather than in person, and Marvel announced him under the name Nathaniel Milbury rather than the character everybody immediately recognised.
In the comics, Mister Sinister is Nathaniel Essex, a Victorian geneticist obsessed with mutant bloodlines, and Milbury is one of the aliases he operates under. Marvel using the alias in the announcement is a small tell: this version is likely to be introduced as a man before he is introduced as a monster.
Sinister is also the correct villain for a first film. He is not a world ender. He is a collector, and a story about a scientist harvesting mutant genetics is a story that can run across three movies without burning the multiverse down again.
Christopher Abbott is not replacing Patrick Stewart
There is confusion circulating on this, so it is worth being precise.
The D23 show floor also carried Nightcrawler and Mystique costume displays, and a second Doctor Doom suit, all tied to Avengers: Doomsday in December. Legacy Fox actors have been reported in connection with that film for months. None of that has anything to do with the reboot.
Christopher Abbott is playing Xavier in the 2028 X-Men film. He is 40, which makes him a considerably younger Professor X than either Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy played, and it suggests a school that is still being built rather than an institution with decades behind it. Anything you read merging the two casts is merging two different movies.
Who is missing from the X-Men cast
Almost everybody, and that is deliberate. Feige said explicitly that further casting announcements are coming in the following months.
No Wolverine. No Magneto. No Beast, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Gambit, Jubilee or Kitty Pryde. Six mutants and one villain is a small roster by X-Men standards, and it points at a tighter film than the twelve-character ensembles Fox eventually collapsed under.
The Wolverine gap is the loud one. Hugh Jackman sent a video message to the same showcase in his Doomsday capacity, which does not clarify anything about 2028 and was almost certainly not meant to.
Where May 5, 2028 sits
The date puts X-Men after both Avengers films. Avengers: Doomsday lands on December 18, 2026, with Secret Wars following, which means the reboot opens the next phase rather than closing this one.
That ordering matters. Whatever the multiverse looks like after Secret Wars is the world these mutants walk into, and Marvel gets to define how mutants have always existed in it without needing to explain their absence from the last twenty films. It is the cleanest reset the studio has given itself since 2008.
The verdict
This is a young, largely uncelebrated X-Men cast fronted by one genuine star turn in Adam Driver, directed by the person who made Thunderbolts work. Marvel has chosen actors over names, which is the same instinct that produced the original 2008 Iron Man gamble and the opposite of the instinct that produced the last three years.
Two years is a long wait. On this evidence it is being spent on the right things.
Which casting are you least sure about? Ours is Storm, only because Maya Boyd is the least known quantity on the list. Comments are open.
Sources: Marvel.com, The Direct, GamesRadar. The film remains untitled and further casting is unannounced. X-Men is a Marvel Studios production; all rights belong to Marvel Studios and Disney.
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