On March 26, Marvel Entertainment went live with an image of… a chair. Specifically, a cast member’s chair with Chris Hemsworth’s name on it. Over the next five and a half hours, the livestream very slowly panned across a large warehouse to reveal more and more chairs with the names of actors on the backs. This was the first announcement the public got on any Avengers: Doomsday cast members since it was announced in July of 2024 that Robert Downey Jr. would be playing Victor Von Doom.
Through this livestream, they announced twenty-five cast members for the movie, including some recent heroes such as Anthony Mackie as the new Captain America, some upcoming actors like Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic, and even some performers the public hasn’t seen for quite some time, like Patrick Stewart revising his role as Professor X.
In 1993, Marvel sold the film rights of the X-Men entirely over to Twentieth Century Fox, and they kept those rights all the way up until 2019, when Disney bought Fox, and with it, the rights to the X-Men. Since then, Marvel hasn’t done much with the characters. Dark Phoenix was released three months after the acquisition, but the movie was, for the most part, made before Fox was bought up. In 2020, Marvel released The New Mutants, following a cast and story completely separate from the rest of the X-Men universe. In fact, after Dark Phoenix, the main cast of X-Men wasn’t seen again until the appearance of Beast in the post-credits scene of The Marvels.
So this begs the question- if both the cast of the X-Men and the cast of the Avengers are set to be in Doomsday, how will that work when they’re two entirely separate universes? Well, Marvel has never been very strict on multiversal travel rules, and has even gone as far as to completely reset the main 616 universe multiple times in the comics.
The Avengers movie set to take place after Avengers: Doomsday is Avengers: Secret Wars. In the latest reboot of the Secret Wars comics, the Ultimates universe and the main 616 universe find themselves in a precarious scenario called an Incursion, an event where two universes collide with each other, causing the destruction of both worlds. In this comic, the universes collide and only three groups of people survive- one party ending up on the surface of the new world, one group left under the floor, and the final one a single duo- Doctor Strange and Dr. Doom. With the help of Molecule Man, the doctors create a completely new universe called Battleworld, where Doom is hailed as a god. The comic follows the groups of survivors from the previous worlds as they attempt to stop Doom and his new regime. In the end, Peter Parker and Miles Morales find Molecule Man, who is holding the entire universe together, and convince him to reset everything again- this time, by returning the timeline to normal.
A scenario very similar to this could very well play out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing the X-Men and Avengers universes together into one collective, and finally bringing the characters everyone knows and loves into the same timeline. But that’s just a theory.
