Even though it’s still almost a year away, the first teasers for Avengers: Doomsday have been dropping over the holidays. Only one of them has been officially released, but thanks to others being shown in theaters, we’ve been given our first, very grainy, look at teaser number three, and it stars three returning X-Men.
All bets are now off in the MCU when it comes to which characters can be pulled from where. That means, while we’ll be getting some new mutants, X-Men from Marvel’s movie past can also appear. We’ve already seen Hugh Jackman return from the dead as Wolverine, and now the leaked teaser has provided first looks at three more returning X-Men.
We hear a conversation between Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart at the start of the teaser, before we are eventually shown the pair returning to their roles as Magneto and Charles Xavier, 25 years after they played the iconic Marvel characters for the first time. Their conversation implies the X-Men haven’t been doing all that great in whatever timeline they call home, and the final shot from the teaser further confirms that we’re getting reacuainted with those particular X-Men at a low point.
After being shown Magneto and Xavier, we cut to a shot of James McAvoy, back in his Cyclops gear for the first time in over a decade. Surrounded by rubble and flames, Cyclops rips off his protective eyewear and fires off the concussive blast from his eyes into the sky, screaming as he does so.
Marsden’s portrayal of Cyclops in the original X-Men movies has often been ridiculed by Marvel fans. The blame isn’t usually pinned on Marsden himself, but on those in charge of his direction and how the character was written. That’s demonstrated in the early reactions to his brief appearnace in the teaser as X-Men fans are already convinced Cyclops’s role in Doomsday is guaranteed to surpass everything he did in the prior movies based on the two seconds we’ve seen of him so far.
There’s an awful AI recreation of the teaser also doing the rounds that adds Wolverine into the mix. I’m not sharing it here, but you’ll know it if you see it. It’s terrible.
Thanks to Doomsday’s viral casting reveal and various leaks, we’ve known that X-Men are going to play a bigger role in the MCU starting next year. Although not shown in this particular teaser, we know that Beast, Mystique, and Nightcrawler will be among the mutants shown here.
That makes three teasers and if you have been to see Avatar Fire and Ash more than once, you may well have seen them all on the big screen. The only one that’s been officially released confirmed Chris Evans will return as Steve Rogers, while the second leakers teaser shows Chris Hemsworth’s Thor working alongside his daughter, Love.
- Release Date
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December 18, 2026
- Director
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Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
- Writers
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Stephen McFeely, Michael Waldron, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee
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Vanessa Kirby
Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
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Joseph Quinn
Johnny Storm / Human Torch
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Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Ben Grimm / The Thing
