How should Marvel bring the X-Men into the MCU? The original Jean Grey has an idea

Sooner or later, Disney is bringing the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Famke Janssen (Jean Grey) has some tips for them.

A lot of people are talking about the X-Men this week, since it’s the 20th anniversary of the movie that officially kicked off the current superhero-driven entertainment world we’re currently living in. Simply put, without 2000’s X-Men, we don’t have the Marvel Cinematic Universe and everything that comes with it. What would be obsessing over instead? We don’t wanna think about it.

Fox made a whole mess of X-Men movies after that first one, some great, some middling. But just last year, Disney bought Fox, which means Disney now has the film rights to the X-Men characters, which means it’s only a matter of time before these characters get folded into the MCU. And original star Famke Janssen, who played Jean Grey in the older movies, has an idea of how that should happen.

“The one thing that we can say for the X-Men is that there were a lot of women in our films,” she told Observer. “Strong, superhero women. I think diversity across the board would be amazing. There’s no shortage in any of these X-Men of what you can do and what you can find in terms of diverse characters. I’m assuming that’s what they’ll do anyway, but that is where the work should be headed everywhere.”

Marvel was dinged for a while for not including enough diversity in its movies: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor…the lineup looked pretty…traditional, let’s say.

But they’ve been making strides of late. Black Panther was a huge hit, and there’s a Black Widow movie coming out this year, coronavirus permitting. Captain Marvel was the first MCU movie headlined by a woman, and around the corner the studio has stuff like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and The Eternals, which has a diverse cast.

I agree with Janssen that Disney will probably keep this in mind when it starts making X-Men movies. And she’s right that the series has plenty of iconic female characters. Wolverine and Cyclops and Colossus are all well-known, but so are Jean Grey and Storm and Rogue and Mystique and more. It’s just a deep bench, and Disney should have no problem finding ways to highlight all kinds of different characters. And it already has actors lining up to play the parts:

I’m guessing that Disney will want new faces in these roles, but it’s always possible to bring some of the old actors back. “I think the question is more if they would have any interest in bringing me back,” Janssen chuckled. “With Days of Future Past, there was a surprise way of reintroducing certain characters that had been killed off. In some people’s cases, it was to bring them back as well as the younger versions of their characters. I’d be curious to see what happens [with the Marvel films]. But yes, I would be very open to it.”

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h/t SyFy Wire