Marvel at D23: Marvel reveals new X-Men cast with Adam Driver, Kit Connor and Sadie Sink joining reboot

Where something or someone comes in the running order of an event says a lot about its significance.

That’s why the last award at the Oscars is best picture (or it usually is, there was that awkward Covid year when the producers decided to go off-piste), because it’s what everyone has been waiting for. It’s the biggest award of the night.

So, it says a lot that during Disney’s fan convention extravaganza, D23, held over the weekend in Los Angeles, during the entertainment showcase on night one, Marvel Studios chose to save its announcements about X-Men at the very end of its section.

It may have Avengers: Doomsday coming up in December, a gargantuan all-in superhero epic that could make or break the company’s future plans, but it wanted to leave the fans with some X-Men teases. That’s what everyone will remember.

Marvel has recruited a new class of X-Men superheroes and villains as it prepares to relaunch a franchise that, for most of this century, was outside of its control.

There was what we already knew, Sadie Sink would play the telekinetic Jean Grey, having already made her debut in character in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and what had been rumoured, which is that English actor Kit Connor would take over the role of Cyclops/Scott Summers and that Australian star Samara Weaving would be Emma Frost.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige than introduced Girls alum Christopher Abbott as Charles Xavier/Professor X, a role that has been held by Patrick Stewart and James McEvoy in the past, followed by Obsession breakout Inde Navarette as Rogue and Broadway stage star Maya Boyd as Storm.

At last, the screen above them flickered and Adam Driver appeared, sharing that he would join the X-Men movie as villain Nathaniel Milbury/Mister Sinister. Only a month ago, Feige had said on a podcast that Driver had turned down so many Marvel roles it had “become a tradition”. Looks they finally found one that fit.

There’s a lot riding on this X-Men relaunch, and the time it’s taken for Marvel to mount it reflects how significant it is for the studio – the IP wasn’t something it wanted to either get lost or squander by rushing.

The previous X-Men movies kicked off in 2000, as is often considered the starter pistol for the current era of superhero films.

Back then, the movies were being made by 20th Century Fox which had bought the screen rights from Marvel in the 1990s. It populated that universe with serious thespians and stars who were both popular and up-and-coming, including Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin, Halle Berry, James Marsden and Famke Janssen.

There had been three movies in the original trilogy, some Wolverine spin-offs, a couple of Deadpool chapters, and four prequel films which cast a younger group of actors (McEvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult) as in the same roles.

X-Men is one of the biggest brands within the Marvel comics stable, and it was something of a bummer for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, after it launched in 2008, to not have the screen rights to those characters.

That all changed when Disney, which owns Marvel, gobbled up 20th Century Fox for $US71 billion. That brought the X-Men (and Fantastic Four) screen rights back to Marvel and allowed for those characters to be integrated into its shared narrative universe.

It’s understandable that Marvel wanted to take it time to bring X-Men into the fold. The MCU already has so many characters and stories and it’s gotten unwieldy – more recently, Marvel, perhaps unconvincingly, has had to emphasise that new releases don’t require you to do homework by catching up on scores of films and TV shows.

But it does seem like given the number of years to get to this point of casting announcements, the next X-Men chapter is going to need to be spectacular.

There’s already a director attached: Jake Schreier, who helmed the Thunderbolts movie last year. Thunderbolts underperformed at the box office, but creatively, it was pretty sharp, balancing thrills and pathos.

Schreier has also brought on his former collaborators on the acclaimed Netflix series Beef, creator Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo (who was also a writer on The Bear) to pen the screenplay. In terms of talent who have a unique voice and tone, this is the team. That bodes well.

But quality is no guarantee of success. In the past five years, there have been as many commercial misfires in this genre as there have been barnstormers, and audiences are either looking for something that is genuinely fresh or have such an entrenched love for a character (like Spider-Man) that they’re willing to set aside superhero fatigue.

The X-Men could be that magic bullet, and in casting the likes of Sink, hot off her roles in Stranger Things and on Broadway, Navarette, who has so much heat off Obsession, and Connor, who starred in YA favourite Heartstopper, Marvel wants a new generation of fans to connect with the brand.

Navarette, in particular, represents a concession to a younger demographic who aren’t necessarily dazzled by big names or big budgets.

But before that all kicks off in May 2028, it will still need to manage the transition from the old class to the new.

Some of the OG X-Men, including Stewart, McKellen, Marsden, Rebecca Romjin and Alan Cumming, will be in Avengers: Doomsday, which should set the foundation for what to expect from the misfit mutants of Professor X’s school.