Which X-Men Franchise Mainstays Won’t Be Back For ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’?


The X-Men franchise has a good number of mainstays, established actors who’ve pretty much made Fox’s line of mutant movies into the successful series they are. X-Men: Apocalypse, though, is going to be missing two of those characters when it hits theaters next year, the two actors playing Professor X and Magneto.

Don’t panic though; you can rest assured that you’ll be seeing some form of Professor X and Magneto on screen when X-Men: Apocalypse opens. It’s just that we’ll only be seeing James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, the younger incarnations of the two monolithic X-Men characters. That’s according to new reports that fan favorites Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan won’t be appearing in X-Men: Apocalypse. The news comes straight from Professor X himself.

“I was learning quite a lot about it last night,” Stewart told Larry King recently, “and it is going to be looking very much at the earlier lives of all our characters. And so I don’t think we’ll be making an appearance. ”

That doesn’t give us too much in the way of information on what we can expect from X-Men: Apocalypse, but it does seem to rule out any of the time travel and future visions that we got with last year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past.

It does look, though, like we’ll be getting different looks at younger versions of the X-Men, just as Stewart said. Efforts are already underway to cast younger versions of Storm, Cyclops, and Jean Grey, and there’s no telling what other characters we might see next year.

Another thing we know about X-Men: Apocalypse is that it will apparently focus heavily a romance between the biggest stars in the rebooted franchise, Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique and Michael Fassbender’s Magneto. Apocalypse will close out the trilogy that began with X-Men: First Class, and it is uncertain where the main series will go once McAvoy, Fassbender, and Lawrence’s time with the characters is up.

Other possibilities include a crossover with the Fantastic Four, another Marvel franchise that Fox owns the film rights to. Fox is betting big on the Four, with one movie due out later this year and a sequel already slated for 2017, even though rumor has it that some people are less than happy with the movie as it currently exists.

One other thing that appears to be certain: the next X-Men movie will focus heavily on the villain. Oscar Isaac, who plays the ancient Apocalypse, says that he’s seen some of the designs for the character’s look, promising that there’s some very “scary s**t” that will bring the X-Men “to their knees.”

[Lead image via ScreenRant.]

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