[Source: Entertainment Weekly]

“‘Reboot’ is a scary word,” Feige told journalists while promoting “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.”

Halle, Hugh, Robert — it’s been a honor, but all good things must come to an end.

Following 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, several key characters in the MCU will be recast, including Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, and the full team of X-Men, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced during a Friday press event, Variety reported.

Feige said the company is “utilizing” Secret Wars “not just to round out the stories we’ve been telling post-Endgame, just as importantly — and you can look at the at the Secret Wars comics for where that takes you — it very, very much sets us up for the future… Endgame, literally, was about endings. Secret Wars is about is about beginnings.”

Marvel has slowed the pace of MCU releases from the franchise’s point of greatest saturation, the mid-to-late 2010s, in which three, even four films were released per year.

The company released only one film in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine, and though three are slated for this year — Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts*, both previously released, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, coming next weekend — there’s just one film apiece pegged to 2026 and 2027: Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars.

Secret Wars represents a critical reorienting juncture for the franchise, Feige indicated, but hesitated to call it a reboot.

“‘Reboot’ is a scary word… Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people,” he explained, describing the film instead as a “reset” for the MCU. “Reset, singular timeline — we’re thinking along those lines.”

“X-Men is where that will happen next,” he added.

It’s no surprise that Feige is is pegging a “reset” to the X-Men, given the company’s years-long effort to buy the characters back from 21st Century Fox, which finally came to fruition in 2019 when Disney, Marvel’s parent company, acquired Fox.

In 2024, Feige teased “a new age of mutants and of the X-Men,” and this past March, Marvel finally announced that after a smattering of X-Men teases in MCU films — the original films’ star Kelsey Grammer appeared as Beast in The Marvels, while Patrick Stewart’s Professor X showed up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — Avengers: Doomsday will officially mark the MCU’s first full showing of X-Men characters.

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