It’s weird to realize the first X-Men movie hit screens fifteen years ago. This is a franchise that has been around for a while, and it’s not going anywhere, with X-Men: Apocalypse going all ’80s on us. But with a time period that long, age becomes a factor, and Storm, Cyke, and Jean Grey might suddenly be someone else.
In an interview with Yahoo! Movies, one of the series’ producers, Simon Kinberg, was asked about recasting and had this to say:
“If we included some of the original X-Men like Storm and Jean and Scott and other in Apocalypse, yeah we’d have to recast them… It would be really hard to do. Halle and Famke and Jimmy and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those parts to life, and are so identified with those parts now. So it would be a tall task.”
Notice he didn’t say anything about Hugh Jackman. Joking aside, the “if” is attention-getting. It sounds a bit like it’s still up in the air whether we’ll see these characters in Apocalypse, and truthfully, it probably makes sense to let them rest. It’s not like there are any shortage of characters from First Class, and honestly, the soft reboot at the end of the last movie was as much to give them some room on topics like this as it was to make us forget X-Men: The Last Stand.
Also, it just would not be in keeping with series tradition to give James Marsden a break. At least he’s got Liz Lemon to console him.
