X-Men Movie Casting Breakdown: Marvel Already Told You the Plot

Somebody left a comment last week telling me I should do more news. More of what the big channels do. Get out in front of the announcement, react fast, be first.

I thought about it for a week, and the answer is no.

Not because news is beneath us. Because being first is worth about six hours, and I’m one guy who does a lot, and I would lose that race every single time. So here’s what we’re doing instead.

Back in August, Marvel put the X-Men cast on a stage at D23. Six names at once. At the end of it, Adam Driver came on by video, and he opened with a joke. He said he was playing Magneto. The room laughed. He let it sit for a second, and then he said the actual name.

Nathaniel Milbury.

And the room kept laughing, and then everybody went home. For the last month the entire internet has been arguing about whether Samara Weaving is the right Emma Frost, and nobody looked up Milbury.

I looked up Milbury.

How DEVELOPING Works

This is a new thing, and it’s called DEVELOPING. When a movie is a year or two out and the news comes in one piece at a time, I’m not going to sprint at every announcement the morning it drops. I’m going to hold a picture of what I think the movie actually is, and every time a new name lands, we come back and either that picture gets sharper or it breaks. All of it goes on a board with dates on it, so you can hold me to every word.

Today’s board is X-Men.

Who Is Nathaniel Milbury?

Nathaniel Milbury isn’t a made-up name. It’s an alias. It belongs to Nathaniel Essex, and if that name doesn’t do anything for you either, the one you may know is Mister Sinister.

Sinister is not a guy who shows up and fights the team. He has exactly one interest, and he’s had it since 1987. He is obsessed with Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Not the X-Men. Those two, specifically, genetically.

In the comics he grows a woman named Madelyne Pryor out of Jean Grey’s cells, gives her a fake life, plants her in Alaska next door to Scott’s parents, and waits for Scott to fall in love with her so the two of them will have a baby. Because the baby is what he actually wanted. He tells Cyclops this to his face in X-Factor #39. He caused the plane crash. He put Scott in the orphanage. He had Scott’s brother adopted out so Scott would be alone and easier to handle. He ran the orphanage. He lived next door under this exact name.

So Marvel didn’t announce a mystery villain at D23. They announced the plot out loud, in the joke slot, while the room was still laughing at the Magneto line.

The villain is Mister Sinister, and he was announced in plain sight.

Jean and Scott: The Bloodline Is the Spine

If that’s who the villain is, go back and look at the order they hired people in.

Jean Grey wasn’t announced at D23. Sadie Sink was already cast. She got seeded in a Spider-Man movie a whole film early, before a single other mutant existed on screen. Then Scott Summers, Kit Connor. Those are the two halves of the thing Sinister spends 40 years trying to breed.

And look at who they got. Sink’s most famous scene, the one everybody knows, is a girl being taken over from the inside and dragged back out by a memory. That’s not a coincidence when the character has a cosmic firebird in her future.

Connor is the one people are underrating. Everybody knows him from Heartstopper, which is pure decency, and that’s the Cyclops everyone thinks they’re getting. But he was also in Warfare, which is two hours of men holding it together while they’re terrified. So they hired a guy who can play the Boy Scout and the commander cracking underneath it at the same time. I think that’s the whole part, and it’s the part the movies have never once given him. Fox used Cyclops as the other guy in a love triangle so Wolverine would look better, then killed him off screen and left his sunglasses in the dirt.

This ain’t that. The Summers and Grey bloodline is the spine of this movie.

Samara Weaving’s Emma Frost

Which brings me to the casting everybody is actually mad about. Emma Frost, Samara Weaving. The comments are full of “they couldn’t afford Margot?” and lists of who should have gotten it.

Here’s the thing. Nobody arguing about this is asking why Emma Frost is in this movie at all.

Because she doesn’t need to be. If you’re doing Dark Phoenix, that whole story, the Hellfire Club is enough. Emma shows up in 1980, she kidnaps the team, Jean psychically takes her apart, and she’s out of the story. She’s the opening move. She’s not required.

She’s only required if you’re doing the other story, the one where Scott Summers and Emma Frost end up together after Jean dies. In that story, Emma is the person who tells Scott the truth about himself: all that control isn’t discipline. It’s fear.

And you can’t cast that cold. That’s the mistake everyone makes with Emma, playing her frozen. Emma’s funny. That’s her weapon. She says the cruelest accurate thing in the room, it lands like a joke, and you laugh before you realize what she did to you.

Samara Weaving does exactly that for a living. They cast the voice, not the fancast.

Christopher Abbott’s Professor X

Here’s the one I think is the biggest tell in the whole cast, and almost nobody is talking about it. Charles freaking Xavier. Christopher Abbott. He’s 40.

Go look at what Christopher Abbott does. Poor Things, It Comes at Night, James White, Wolf Man. He plays quiet men, and specifically quiet men where the quiet is a lid on something, and you spend the movie not sure if he’s the safe one. You don’t hire that guy to play a kind, bald man in a wheelchair who believes in the dream.

And you shouldn’t, because that Xavier has been gone from the comics for something like 20 years. Marvel publishes an article on its own website called “The Worst Things Professor X Has Ever Done.” He faked his own death and let his students grieve him for two years. He kept using the Danger Room after he knew it was alive and in pain. He sent a second team of kids to die on an island, then reached into Scott Summers’ head and deleted his own brother out of it.

That’s the version. That’s the one you hire Christopher Abbott for.

Now put that next to Sinister for a second. One man edits genes to make better people. The other man edits minds to make better people. Both of them did it to Scott Summers, he was a kid, and neither one asked.

Xavier is cast to be distrusted.

Storm and Rogue Are Runway Hires

Storm is Maya Boyd, and if you’ve never heard of her, that’s kind of the point. She’s a Broadway star: Merrily We Roll Along, & Juliet, almost no screen credits. People are reading that as Marvel being cheap.

I read it as Marvel finally admitting something. Halle Berry is an Oscar winner, and they gave her four movies of nothing. Star casting did not produce a good Storm. It produced a famous person standing in the background saying one line about toads.

Storm has to deliver dialogue that is basically liturgy without it turning into camp. That’s a stage skill. And comic Storm doesn’t take over the team for five years, doesn’t fight for the leadership for eight, doesn’t lose her powers until something like year nine. You can’t cast a movie star that young into an arc that only pays off in the third film. You buy runway.

Same read on Rogue. Inde Navarrette, best known right now for Obsession. Except Rogue comes with more baggage than anybody else in this cast, and I mean that as a compliment. She has two adoptive mothers who are supervillains, and she has the Carol Danvers thing, where she touched Captain Marvel too long, permanently took her powers, her memories, and her whole personality, and then had to share her own head with her.

The MCU already has a Carol Danvers.

Storm and Rogue are runway hires, and Rogue’s fuse is already lit.

Asa Germann’s Angel and Jake Schreier

The last name so far landed on the tenth: Asa Germann.

The 1963 Angel is the least interesting X-Man ever created. He’s a rich, handsome guy with wings, and that’s the whole character for about 15 years. So you’d expect them to cast a rich, handsome guy.

They cast the kid from Gen V. What he’s known for there is playing a young man with reality-breaking powers and serious psychiatric damage who spent the show institutionalized. That’s not a trust fund hire, because there’s a second version of Angel, and it’s the one everybody actually remembers. His wings get pinned to a wall. They go gangrenous. A guy who works for his own team gets a court order to amputate them against his will. He gets on his private jet, the jet has been sabotaged, and Apocalypse picks him up seconds before it explodes and rebuilds him with metal. Archangel. The pretty one, taken apart and handed back as a weapon.

That’s an Archangel hire, not a 1963 hire.

And then there’s the guy running all of it, Jake Schreier. His last movie was Thunderbolts, a Marvel tentpole that is secretly about depression. Before that, Beef, which is two people destroying their entire lives over a parking space. He makes things about damaged people where the damage is the actual plot.

So line it all up. A director whose last film was about depression. A Jean Grey famous for being occupied from the inside. A Xavier played by a man you’re not sure you should trust. An Emma Frost who gets inside people. An Angel known for playing a boy whose powers are a psychiatric condition. And a villain who is a scientist obsessed with designing people, played by the one actor in this entire cast they paid for.

Every hire points at the same thing.

Who’s Missing From the Cast

Now the part that actually convinced me, which is the stuff that isn’t there.

No Magneto. No Sentinel, no Trask, no Stryker, no Registration Act. Not one anti-mutant villain announced. Not one. Every X-Men movie since 2000 has been the same story: will they let us exist? That story needs somebody who wants mutants gone.

This cast doesn’t have one. Sinister isn’t a bigot. He’s a fan. He doesn’t want mutants dead. He wants mutants made. He doesn’t hate Scott Summers. He collects him.

And that one swap changes what the movie is even about. Not “will the world accept us?” but “who made me, and do I belong to them?”

This is not a persecution story.

One more absence, because it points somewhere different. There’s no Beast and there’s no Iceman. Half the internet has decided this is the original five assembling, and people are demanding those two get cast to complete the set. You can’t do the original five without Beast and Iceman. That’s not an opinion. That’s arithmetic.

Everything we’ve been told is that Jean arrives at a school that’s already open, Storm and Rogue are already there, and Xavier is already running it. The team exists before the movie starts. That’s the X-Men ‘97 move: open after the origin, with the team already broken in, and X-Men ‘97 is arguably the best received X-Men anything in 20 years.

It’s not an origin. We’re dropping in midstream.

The Board So Far, and What Breaks It

So that’s the board as it stands, and I want to be straight with you about the rules now, because this is an ongoing thing. I’m not going to chase every announcement the day it drops. When a new name lands, we come back here and read it the same way, and the picture either gets sharper or it breaks. If it breaks, I’m not quietly deleting anything. It stays on the board with a stamp on it.

Here’s what I’m watching. If they cast Madelyne Pryor, this is confirmed, and it isn’t close. If they cast Cable, same thing. Mystique or Destiny drags Rogue’s whole manufactured childhood into it. Apocalypse, because Sinister only exists because Apocalypse made him.

And here’s what kills it. Beast and Iceman get cast, and we’re back to the team origin. Magneto shows up in a big role, and the civil rights story is back on. A Sentinel walks through a wall, and the villain stops being the interesting one. Wolverine gets cast, and this stops being Cyclops’ movie, because it always does.

Any of those land, and I’ll come back and tell you I got it wrong.

Why There’s No Know-It-All Index

Normally this is where I hand you the Know-It-All Index. There’s no Index today. You can’t score a movie that doesn’t exist yet, so I’m not going to put a number on a cast list and pretend that’s the same thing. The board is the score on this one. Come back when it’s full.

Because here’s where I keep landing. The character Marvel just built this entire movie around is the one nobody in Hollywood has ever known what to do with. They benched him three separate times so the guy with the claws could have the scene. They killed him off screen and left his sunglasses in the dirt. And now the villain, the school, the woman he loves, and the woman he’ll love after her are every one of them pointing at Scott Summers.

He finally gets to be the main character. He just doesn’t get to be a person.

Your turn, and I want you to work for this one. Tell me what breaks it, not what you want to happen. What single announcement would make me come back and admit I read this whole thing wrong? Put it in the comments on the video. The board lives at knowitallnation.com/developing, every claim with the outlet that broke it and the date it went up, and when one of you says something sharper than what I said, it goes on the wall next to mine.

What’s the one announcement that breaks this board? Make your case in the comments on the video.