It’s a fact; mutants exist in the MCU. Thanks to revelations in the likes of Ms. Marvel and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, we know that mutantkind is already out there on Earth-616. Expanding out into the wider multiverse, cameos from legacy Foxverse stars, starting in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and then expanding in Deadpool 3, are furthering the increasing importance of the most uncanny superhero team of them all in the Marvel Studios franchise.
And yet it’s worth pointing out that, to date, the words “X-Men” have yet to be uttered in any MCU project. We do have the X-Men ’97 animated series coming up, but that’s certainly occupying its own corner of the Marvel cosmos. So it’s understandable that there are growing concerns and confusions surrounding the X-Men brand. Could there even be plans to drop the X-Men name as the team comes together while the MCU grows out? Let’s take a look at the evidence…
Could Marvel Studios’ X-Men reboot have a different title?
The X-Men name conversation has just been restarted thanks to an intriguing new Disney Plus update. The streaming platform recently changed the title for its X-Men collection on its Marvel homepage to “Mutant Legacy,” which caught the attention of fastidious fans everywhere as it seems to indicate that Disney is looking to distance itself from the X-Men umbrella brand name. This in turn got Redditors asking the question “Is Marvel Studios REALLY Going to change The X-Men’s name in the MCU?”
So, is this going to happen? Well, way back in 2019, then-Marvel Studios producer Victoria Alonso admitted that she found the X-Men name to be “outdated” due to the many prominent female team members. For a long while there, we were left to assume Alonso’s position was representative of Marvel as a whole. However, Alonso was fired from her position earlier this year, in a rather messy corporate break-up, so it remains wholly unclear if Alonso’s opinion was the company line or — ahem — rogue.
As Redditors point out, however, Kevin Feige himself is clearly a massive X-Men fanboy — hence his keenness to bring back so many Fox stars and hark back to X-Men: The Animated Series — so he’s likely to keep it for nostalgia reasons alone. What’s more, studio execs would no doubt be fearful of wasting an established brand with an enormous cultural cache if they do ditch the lucrative X-Men name.
All in all, then, there is certain evidence suggesting the X-Men name may be about to exit the chat, but it is hard to imagine that the MCU is going to throw aside a brand that — historically — has a lot more mileage in popular culture than the Avengers.