The war has begun in the latest X-Men: Apocalypse trailer

By Rick Marshall Published March 17, 2016

Batman, Superman, and the Avengers aren’t the only superheroes facing an impending, big-screen battle this year. The X-Men will have their own all-out war to deal with in a few months.

20th Century Fox has released a new, explosive trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse that offers a preview of the devastating conflict that will turn mutant against mutant in the upcoming film, and will introduce one of the team’s most dangerous enemies.

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Along with featuring most of the major players in Apocalypse — both returning characters and newcomers — the trailer also includes quite a bit of new footage from the film, which director Bryan Singer has described as the third chapter in a trilogy that began with 2011’s X-Men: First Class.

Appearing in the trailer are many of the franchise’s newest cast members, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens actor Oscar Isaac as the titular villain Apocalypse, Alexandra Shipp as Storm, Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner as Jean Grey, Kodi Smit-McPhee as Nightcrawler, Ben Hardy as Angel, Tye Sheridan as Cyclops, The Newsroom actress Olivia Munn as Psylocke, and Lana Condor as Jubilee.

Returning actors include James McAvoy as the team’s leader and mutant telepath Charles Xavier, as well as Michael Fassbender as Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Rose Byrne as Moira MacTaggert, and Lucas Till as Havok (the energy-manipulating mutant he played in First Class).

The official synopsis for the film reads as follows:

Since the dawn of civilization, he was worshiped as a god. Apocalypse, the first and most powerful mutant from Marvel’s X-Men universe, amassed the powers of many other mutants, becoming immortal and invincible. Upon awakening after thousands of years, he is disillusioned with the world as he finds it and recruits a team of powerful mutants, including a disheartened Magneto (Michael Fassbender), to cleanse mankind and create a new world order, over which he will reign. As the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) with the help of Professor X (James McAvoy) must lead a team of young X-Men to stop their greatest nemesis and save mankind from complete destruction.

X-Men: Apocalypse is scheduled to hit theaters May 27, 2016.

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Deadpool & Wolverine: Here’s how the X-Men can be introduced into the MCU

Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) uses his telepathy in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

When the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched in 2008, the fledgling Marvel Studios was forced to get by without some of their own most ubiquitous characters. Marvel had escaped bankruptcy in the 1990s by selling off the movie rights to their hottest comics libraries, such as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. Against all odds, this didn’t stop Marvel Studios into becoming a box office juggernaut that turned B- and C-list superheroes like Iron Man and Rocket Raccoon into cultural phenomena. However, with the Marvel empire now in decline, the MCU desperately needs an injection of new characters to recapture audience attention. And as fate (by which we mean, the iron hand and bottomless pockets of Disney) would have it, nearly all of the characters that Marvel auctioned off decades ago are now back in play -- namely, the X-Men.
The addition of familiar favorites like Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Rogue, and Deadpool into the MCU has been inevitable ever since Disney purchased X-Men rights holders 20th Century Fox in 2019, but Marvel has taken its time in reintroducing these absent characters into the sprawling franchise. There have been some teases throughout the ongoing Multiverse Saga, but so far, no notable X-Men characters have debuted in the core continuity of the MCU (referred to as Earth-616 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but as Earth-199999 in most other places).
That may all change after Deadpool & Wolverine, a film that serves as a bridge between the now-defunct 20th Century Fox X-Men film franchise and Disney/Marvel’s MCU. Here, Ryan Reynolds reprises his role as the wisecracking, fourth-wall-smashing Deadpool, whose films take place in a continuity adjacent to the mainline Fox X-Men series, while Hugh Jackman returns to portray a version of Wolverine from a timeline we’ve never seen before. It’s a multiverse-hopping adventure involving the Time Variance Authority from the MCU series Loki, and will certainly have implications on how and in what form the X-Men will arrive in Marvel’s main movie timeline.
We’ve got a few ideas regarding how the X-Men’s MCU debut might play out, based on hints from Deadpool & Wolverine’s trailers, existing films, and context from the comic book source material.

Multiversal mashup
A key difficulty with adding the X-Men to the existing MCU is explaining their absence from the story so far. It’s one thing to hand-wave the Eternals skipping the final battle against Thanos, but it would be a much harder sell if a future MCU installment were to reveal that Charles Xavier’s benevolent Mutant superheroes and/or Magneto’s more radical Brotherhood have been operating in secret all along but somehow never crossed paths with the Avengers. Further, the idea that Mutants have been around for generations is central to a lot of X-Men mythology, and certain characters (namely, Magneto) have firm ties to specific historical events and can’t easily be transplanted into the present day without accounting for their whereabouts in the meantime.
However, throughout the Multiverse Saga -- which began production after Disney bought out Fox -- characters from the core Marvel Cinematic Universe have found themselves in alternate realities that resemble their own but also include X-Men characters. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the MCU’s Strange visits an Earth that is watched over by the Illuminati, a council that includes familiar faces such as Peggy Carter, Professor X, portrayed by a returning Sir Patrick Stewart, and “Mr. Fantastic” Reed Richards, a character who was also reacquired by Disney during the Fox deal.
The Marvels (2023) | Post Credits Scene
In the post-credits scene to The Marvels, Monica Rambeau crosses over into a universe that is home to a superpowered version of her mother, but also Dr. Hank “Beast” McCoy. The setting of Deadpool & Wolverine, which is presumably the home universe of the latter character, features several returning Fox X-Men cast members reprising their roles as well as alternate versions of MCU characters like Ant-Man, and possibly Doctor Strange (or some other sling-ring user).
The implication here seems to be that the multiverse is full of Earths on which the Avengers, the X-Men, and other characters to which Marvel Studios previously couldn’t use have all co-existed from the beginning, more or less the way they have in the comics. This would make the core MCU -- as well as the Avengers-less Fox X-Men universes -- something of an aberration.
Presently, the Multiverse Saga is slated to conclude in 2027 with Avengers: Secret Wars, a film that shares the name of a 2015 comics event in which the Marvel Comics multiverse was collapsed and reformed. If the film centers around a similar disaster, this could be an ideal opportunity to mash the MCU’s Earth with another in which the X-Men have always been around -- not the X-Men from Deadpool or the X-Men movie continuity, but different versions of the characters who could be as similar or different from the ones fans already know and love. Future MCU installments would be free to revisit or reimagine popular storylines in this new context, or to accept the broad strokes of the films that already exist and then move forward.

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Charlie Cox returns as Murdock/Daredevil, the role he originated for three seasons on Netflix's Daredevil. While the spirit of the blind crimefighter will remain the same, Daredevil enters an entirely new universe full of new challenges in Born Again. Marvel Studios' Head of Streaming, Television and Animation Brad Winderbaum compared Cox's return as Daredevil to another revived show, X-Men '97.

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Rogue stands in front of the X-Men in X-Men '97.

It's only aired for one season, but X-Men '97 has already joined the ranks of Marvel Studios' best projects in recent years. Featuring Madelyne Pryor's reign as the Goblin Queen, Storm losing her powers, the destruction of Genosha, and the death of Gambit, this season revived and rebuilt the series to reinvigorate the X-Men and Marvel Universe as a whole.

Overall, the series blew away fans and newcomers alike, and audiences would very much like to see these seven things in season 2.
Madelyne Pryor returns