The X-Men will join the fight to save the multiverse in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, but their exciting return also brings with it some headache-worthy continuity questions. Long before the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the X-Men franchise was the biggest superhero ensemble around, kicking off with 2000’s X-Men (which itself was instrumental in sparking the modern superhero movie craze) and running for over two decades before unceremoniously ending in 2020’s The New Mutants. That would later change with 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine bringing Hugh Jackman’s Logan back into action, and that would just be the start of the Fox X-Men franchise’s unexpected resurrection.
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With the announcement of Marvel Studios’ multiverse double-header Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, both film’s casts are packed to the gills with both MCU regulars and pre-MCU Marvel movie alumni returning to their roles, including key members of the Fox X-Men cast roster. However, as enthralling as it is for the millions who hold a warm place in their hearts for the X-Men franchise to see it play such an integral role in Doomsday and Secret Wars, the characters’ returns also raises a big question of continuity that, ironically, Deadpool & Wolverine can be thanked for.
Deadpool & Wolverine Was Presented as a Goodbye to Fox-Marvel (at First)
Following the announcement of Hugh Jackman’s return to his signature role in Deadpool & Wolverine, the movie gradually began to stand out as a very different kind of Marvel Studios production. By the time it was released into theaters, to even call Deadpool & Wolverine an MCU movie at all felt like a stretch, with the movie’s only real link to the franchise being the presence of the Time Variance Authority. Instead, Deadpool & Wolverine plays as more of a nostalgic love letter to Fox’s Marvel properties (and to a lesser extent New Line Cinema’s with Wesley Snipes’ return as Blade), to the point of even finally bringing Channing Tatum’s never-realized Gambit to life (Tatum’s Gambit is also confirmed to return in Avengers: Doomsday).
Indeed, Deadpool & Wolverine even includes a photo album-style tribute to Fox’s various Marvel Comics-based productions – including 2015’s much-maligned Fant4stic – set to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” While it wasn’t a comprehensive return for every pre-MCU Marvel movie star or character, Deadpool & Wolverine‘s loving tribute to the Fox-Marvel era was a warm, heartfelt goodbye to so many Marvel superhero properties that brought the company’s characters to the big screen long before the MCU began. Since then, the cast lists of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars have made that goodbye much more complicated.
Avengers: Doomsday & Avengers: Secret Wars Have Huge Fox-Marvel Casts (but From Which X-Men Universe?)
With the casts of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, Marvel Studios is assembling quite possibly the largest ensemble of any superhero movie ever made (and that’s without any confirmation of Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men returning, both of which seem like very strong possibilities indeed). Fox’s X-Men franchise in particular is set to see a massive comeback via the Doomsday/Secret Wars story with the sheer number of cast members returning to their respective roles. However, that also raises questions about how Doomsday and Secret Wars will treat the canonicity of the X-Men franchise, given how Blade, Elektra, X-23, and Gambit join Deadpool & Wolverine. Specifically, each character was pruned from their respective universe by TVA agent Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) and dropped into the purgatory known as the Void, with their individual realities being wiped out.
While the movie indicates that Blade, Elektra, and Gambit’s timelines were restored (TVA agent Hunter B-15 responding “I’ll see what I can do” to Wade’s request), the X-Men franchise is a more complex situation, in part because of its own multiple retcons and continuity issues deriving from attempts to reconcile said retcons in everything from X-Men: First Class to X-Men: Days of Future Past. 2017’s Logan also once sat in an ambiguous place in the X-Men universe’s timeline, but Deadpool & Wolverine seemingly made it canon to the Deadpool franchise’s timeline. However, even that has its own problems with the aforementioned retcons and multiple timelines of the X-Men franchise, and with the lack of clarity in Deadpool & Wolverine itself over whether all of the X-Men movies effectively fit into the timeline of Logan, and how that is even possible with the divergent continuities in movies like the quasi-franchise finale of Dark Phoenix and the one-and-done of The New Mutants, both released post-Logan (“These timelines are so confusing,” as Wade himself observes in the first Deadpool). All of that raises a lot more questions about the Doomsday–Secret Wars story and the X-Men cast’s return in them.
How Are the X-Men Being Utilized in the Secret Wars Story (& What Is It Treating As Canon?)
With the X-Men franchise undergoing its timeline reboot in X-Men: Days of Future Past, having a standalone finale of sorts in Logan that has since been retconned into Deadpool’s own timeline, and still having loose ends of continuity with Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants after Logan, bringing Fox’s X-Men cast back in Doomsday and Secret Wars could be the most TLDR-dependent aspect of both movies. Even the theoretical but likely-seeming return of Hugh Jackman is far easier to facilitate, with his Logan in Deadpool & Wolverine being a multiverse variant unconnected to the Fox X-Men franchise. Moreover, Deadpool’s carefree attitude and fourth-wall-breaking makes genuine concerns about continuity all but a moot point in Deadpool & Wolverine, an advantage that Doomsday and Secret Wars don’t have.
Perhaps the easiest way for the X-Men cast to return would be a similar mechanism as Jackman’s own return in Deadpool & Wolverine, presenting them as variants from another reality than the continuity-jumbled Fox-Marvelverse. That could even be a narrative asset, reuniting Jackman’s Wolverine with a surviving team of X-Men from another Earth and giving him one last ride with his found family. By the same token, Doomsday and Secret Wars might actually make an effort to parse the “McAvoy or Stewart” timeline issues with some kind of clarity in the Fox X-Men cast’s presence in the story. In any case, tampering with the fabric of the multiverse always opens a can of worms, and in the multiverse-spanning adventure of Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, sorting out exactly which universe the X-Men hail from, what its timeline of events is, who its anchor being is, and why the TVA has left it alone might be the toughest nut for it to crack after the premature Fox-Marvel farewell in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Deadpool & Wolverine is available to stream on Disney+, and Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars will be released in theaters on December 18th, 2026 and December 17th, 2027.
