Kevin Feige Says The MCU Will Recast Iron Man, Captain America, The X-Men

I’m not sure just how many comic book-based news stories you can extract from Kevin Feige recently deciding to become a James Gunn-level chatterbox in a recent Variety story, but there are a few that stand out.

Namely, the idea that Avengers: Secret Wars is going to be a “reset” for the MCU in some ways, with some individual storylines specifically being affected or culled as we move past the “multiverse.”

Feige also talks about the current plan for the MCU being about seven years out right now, but he says he wants to do this job really forever. But continuing the MCU will come with challenges, and one is continuing to lose big characters to plot points, often involving dying, for the foreseeable future. But that can’t last forever.

Feige addresses this, viewing these roles like how other famed parts get new actors in time:

“Amy Pascal and David Heyman are now searching for a new James Bond,” Feige said. “David [Corenswet]

, the new Superman — he was awesome. That will always be the case.”

“I think it’s hard for anybody to do that when an actor has done such a great role,” he said. “How are they going to ever replace Sean Connery [as James Bond], right?”

It does make sense, it just…hasn’t really happened in the MCU for almost 20 years now, so it’s a bit of a tough concept to wrap fans’ heads around in this context. With DC doing this with Superman, for instance, that’s launching an entire new universe that is not connected to the last Henry Cavill universe almost at all. Marvel doesn’t want MCU 1 and MCU 2 totally cutting off continuity, so it will be a bit weird.

That said, it does not seem viable to simply lose these core characters forever, to be without Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, Black Panther and many others for another decade or more. Recasting does make sense, but how it’s executed is going to be a lot trickier than Batman, Superman or James Bond, which he’s not quite acknowledging.

Separately, Feige talks up the big new era after Secret Wars, which will be heavily focused on the X-Men. This confirms the long-running idea that no, the FOX X-Men are simply not going to be ported over to the MCU. However, that was very much complicated by the fact that most of the FOX X-Men are now in Doomsday and Secret Wars. Plus we already just saw Hugh Jackman in Deadpool and Wolverine. Feige also says they’re exploring more with those characters, so that’s going to be…double Wolverines? And that’s a role that seems almost impossible to recast when Jackman is literally still playing it.

This time around, Feige says they’ll be starting with young mutants, as opposed to the FOX ones where all these actors are over 50, not over 80 in some instances. Again, that makes sense, though we did have a whole FOX “First Class” series of movies. But here it was just inevitable that the MCU was going to do its own slate of X-Men. It’s just sort of weird that this is going to happen right after this big farewell tour to all the FOX X-Men who have been associated with these roles for 25 years now.

It’s a strange new era, but one that the MCU has to face forever. So, who will be taking Stark and Rogers’ shoes, and when?

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