Avengers: Doomsday is set to bring several of the classic X-Men actors from the Fox films back to the big screen, tying Marvel’s past and present together in a way that many longtime viewers have been waiting to see. The returning performers include Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, and Rebecca Romijn, all once again stepping into their well known mutant roles. On top of that, Chris Evans is also expected to return as Steve Rogers, even though his name was not part of the first major cast announcement.
The third teaser for Avengers: Doomsday (playing before this week’s showings of Avatar: Fire and Ash) focuses on the X-Men and sets a grim tone inside the ruined X-Mansion. Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto share a quiet, tense scene that hints at age, regret, and the possibility that they are facing their last stand against a threat linked to Doctor Doom. James Marsden’s Cyclops is shown surrounded by the wreckage of the school, ripping off his visor and screaming as a massive optic blast rips through the debris, strongly suggesting that the team is on the brink of destruction.
Here’s a nice breakdown by Emergency Awesome:
Avengers Doomsday Teaser Trailer: X-Men Breakdown
That sense of looming defeat invites a clear question for fans who watched Deadpool & Wolverine. In that movie, Hugh Jackman’s Logan is deeply shaken by a past event in which the X-Men were wiped out while he was away from the Mansion and unable to defend them. Logan talks about hearing the screams of his teammates and carries guilt over “failing” them, but the film never actually shows the attack or explains exactly how a group as powerful as the X-Men could be wiped out so completely.
The movie instead hints that humans were pushed into launching a brutal, coordinated assault on the X-Mansion, drawing on ideas from the comics story often called the Westchester Incident, where manipulation leads to the slaughter of the team. In the comics, that role belongs to the illusionist Mysterio, who tricks Wolverine into killing his own friends, while later film versions shifted blame to a catastrophic psychic incident tied to Professor X, but Deadpool & Wolverine chooses a different path and keeps the ultimate mastermind off screen. That left a noticeable gap in the story, one that now looks like a deliberate opening that another project could fill.
Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has a long record of planting story threads years before they fully pay off, and the vague nature of the X-Men’s deaths fits that pattern. By the time Deadpool & Wolverine reached theaters in 2024, the broad outlines of both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars were widely reported to be in development, even if the exact scripts were still shifting. It is reasonable to think that the missing details around the fall of that X-Men universe were held back on purpose so that Avengers: Doomsday could reveal them on a much larger stage.
The new teaser’s focus on Professor X, Magneto, and Cyclops in the ruins of the Mansion supports the idea that viewers will finally see the full story of how that team dies, rather than just hearing Logan describe it after the fact. If Avengers: Doomsday shows that Viktor von Doom was the real architect of the massacre, it would directly connect the emotional weight of Deadpool & Wolverine to the main Avengers story and give Wolverine a clear reason to step into the fight in Avengers: Secret Wars against the man who destroyed the people he considered his family.
Avengers: Doomsday is currently scheduled to be released in theaters on December 18, 2026, after a delay from an earlier date. A fourth teaser is expected to arrive in cinemas soon, continuing Marvel’s pattern of rolling out short, character focused previews rather than revealing the whole plot at once. Over the next year, viewers should expect more footage that slowly fills in how the X-Men fit into Doctor Doom’s larger plan and how their apparent destruction reshapes the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward.
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