If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Marvel Studios might be revealing more than it seems about future plans when calling back to Stan Lee's original title for the X-Men

Is Kevin Feige telling us something about Marvel Studios' plans for the X-Men and every other mutant in the MCU without saying it explicitly?

Features by Graeme McMillan, Editor

Published on Mon Nov 18 2024

Popverse's top stories of the day

How Disney+'s What If...? is the moonshot for the next 50 years of Marvel Studios & the MCU
Watch: Dune: Prophecy's Desmond Hart explained: His secret identity, his past, and his possible future [SPOILERS]
Dune: Prophecy's Desmond Hart explained: His secret identity, his past, and his possible future [SPOILERS]

This piece was previously only available for Popverse members. Find out more about membership here.

Since what used to be 20th Century Fox was purchased by Disney, fans have been impatiently wondering when the X-Men were going to show up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s been a recurring question facing Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige, and even though he’s done his best to duck it and offer platitudes, there’s been one thing he’s repeatedly done that’s got us wondering something. This week in Marvel Matters, we're asking: is Marvel Studios looking way, way back in Marvel’s past to find a new take on the X-Men?

As a man who knows better than most how to deal with the press and our unrelenting desire to read into every single thing he says for some secret info that likely isn’t there — oh, don’t worry, we know how ridiculous it can get just as much as you do — Feige is a master at dodging questions and sidestepping potential mis-speaking on any given subject, so we can’t help but notice that he doesn’t really use the term “X-Men” a lot when talking about… well, the X-Men. That’s not to say he never does it (he did it just a couple weeks ago at D23 Brazil, for example), but he’s tended to use a different term far more often: “The Mutants.”

At the world premiere of Deadpool & Wolverine this summer, he said, “I’ve said The Mutants are coming, and it all starts with this movie.” He’s also talked about “the Mutant era,” and said “we have characters from the ‘X-Men’ world, the Mutants, we haven’t had access to before.”

On the one hand, this is simply a way to avoid saying ‘X-Men’ all the time, and also to allow for the fact that, if Marvel Studios builds out this side of the universe correctly, it won’t just be about X-Men; as in Marvel’s comic book line, there can also be X-Force, X-Factor, NYX, and many other properties featuring mutant characters. On the other… what if The Mutants is an intentional callback to the pre-history of the X-Men as well as a way to build out the property to outlive ‘X-Men’ as a brand?

While everyone today knows Marvel’s mutantkind as the X-Men and related titles, that name was actually Plan B for Stan Lee and everyone at Marvel comics at the time; Lee’s original title for the original 1963 comic was, it turns out, ‘The Mutants.’ As Lee explained in an interview, Marvel’s then-publisher Martin Goodman liked the idea of the comic when Lee proposed it, but reportedly said, “nobody knows what a mutant is, you gotta come up with another name.” (Now you know why ‘X-Men’ feels quite as generic and rushed as it does.)

Obviously, going with X-Men didn’t hurt the comic to any real degree, especially once the 1970s rolled around and characters like Storm, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler were introduced to the mix — and by the 1990s when the comic book became a cartoon series that shaped a generation, there was no turning back in terms of branding, even though iconic X-Men writer Chris Claremont has talked about his own displeasure with the name.

But… what if Marvel Studios is doing something different, and more ambitious, as it brings the X-Men franchise to the screen…? And what if that ambition is going to be marked by a desire to take things beyond just one team…?

Perhaps it’s time to pay tribute to Stan Lee one more time, and give these characters the umbrella title they could have had 60 years ago, had Lee had his way.

Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

Follow Popverse for upcoming event coverage and news

Graeme McMillan: Popverse Editor Graeme McMillan (he/him) has been writing about comics, culture, and comics culture on the internet for close to two decades at this point, which is terrifying to admit. He completely understands if you have problems understanding his accent.