The wait for Marvel’s mutants has been measured in teases rather than hard dates, stretching back to the day Disney closed its 20th Century Fox deal in 2019. Six years on, the slate around them has kept filling up, while the one film fans actually want has remained a rumor, with a director attached and not much else.
Deadpool & Wolverine offered a taste, Avengers: Doomsday is pulling legacy faces such as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen back into the fold this December, and Jake Schreier’s reboot already has Oscar-nominated writer Michael Lesslie and a script in progress. What nobody at Marvel had said plainly, though, was where the standalone film actually sits in the queue.
Speaking on stage at BilibiliWorld in Shanghai (via Murphy’s Multiverse), Kevin Feige finally laid out the order. After Doomsday, he explained, comes Avengers: Secret Wars, and only then do the mutants take the lead, with Feige calling it a moment when “the mutants are coming, and the X-Men are coming.”
“I can’t wait for all of you to see Avengers: Doomsday, we have a movie after that called Avengers: Secret Wars, and after that the mutants are coming and the X-Men are coming and that’s been a dream of mine. I started with the X-Men many, many years ago and to bring a new version into the MCU is going to be very exciting.”
Doing the maths is sobering for anyone hoping the X-Men turn up soon. Secret Wars opens in December 2027, which puts Schreier’s film in 2028 at the earliest, and Marvel has still not attached an official release date to it. That timing lines up neatly with the MCU’s 20th anniversary in 2028, a milestone the studio would presumably like to mark with something big.
For all the energy around the comments, this is really Feige restating a position he has held for a while. He first pointed to a post-Secret Wars arrival in late 2024 and has since framed the crossover as a “reset” rather than a reboot, the point at which the recast mutants step into a single, tidied-up timeline. What’s new is the clean, on-stage ordering, delivered to a hall full of fans rather than buried in a press roundtable.
Feige did add one fresh wrinkle. He went out of his way to praise the team’s female characters and said they would be arriving very soon, a line that has fed ongoing casting chatter about a female-led roster. Insider reports naming the likes of Kitty Pryde as a co-lead remain firmly unconfirmed, so it is worth treating the specifics as rumor until Marvel puts names on a call sheet.
Marvel has locked a Saturday Hall H return at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, and a first look at Schreier’s cast would be exactly the kind of reveal that panel excels in. Whether Feige saves the mutants for that stage or keeps them under wraps a little longer, the road to them is at last a straight line.
