In a bit of news that sounds way more exciting to those who haven’t been following the franchise’s complicated mythology, X-Men: Days Of Future Past writer Simon Kinberg has all but confirmed that several X-Men characters will be recast for the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. As previously announced, Apocalypse will be set in the 1980s and will focus on the X-Men: First Class cast including Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), and Beast (Nicholas Hoult). And just as McAvoy and Fassbender played younger versions of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, the film will likely recast new actors for the younger versions of characters like Storm, Jean Grey, and Cyclops—seeing as all would be teenagers in the 1980s.
“It’d be very hard to do, because Halle [Berry], Famke [Janssen], and Jimmy [Marsden] and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those characters to life,” Kinberg said during a fan Q&A session on Yahoo. “But I also would have said before First Class that there would be no actors who can stand alongside Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart.” (Wolverine, of course, will still be played by Hugh Jackman, both because Jackman is the biggest star in the X-Men franchise, and because Wolverine doesn’t really age.)
The film’s creators have been playing coy about the exact plot of X-Men: Apocalypse—Kinberg starts out with the caveat that this recasting only applies “if we include some of the original X-Men”—but it seems likely that the film will be an origin story of the original X-Men team. But what this news really means is that fantasy casting can now officially get underway. Lupita Nyong’o as Storm seems like a no brainer.