Who will replace Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine? Marvel’s X-Men reboot with Sadie Sink has oversized shoes to fill

For twenty years, Fox's X-Men films built something Marvel Studios has never had to build from scratch: A mutant mythology with faces attached. Hugh Jackman was Wolverine for so long that the character's retirement, staged with real finality in 2017's Logan and then undone for one last victory lap in Deadpool & Wolverine, felt like an abrupt switch in eras.

Patrick Stewart's Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto turned a decades-spanning chess match between friends into the emotional spine of the franchise. Even the films everyone agrees were failures, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix, didn't dent the audience's loyalty to the actors themselves. Fox lost the plot on plenty of scripts. It never really lost its cast.

That's the inheritance Marvel Studios is now sitting on, and it's a strange one: A twenty-year head start on audience affection, attached to a studio that no longer owns the rights to use any of it directly. When Disney absorbed 20th Century Fox in 2019, it inherited the X-Men, but not a clean slate. It inherited comparison.

Marvel's solution, at least in the short term, has been to borrow the old cast one more time before introducing the new one. Avengers: Doomsday, arriving in December 2026, brings back a cluster of Fox-era mutants — Stewart's Professor X and McKellen's Magneto among them, alongside James Marsden's Cyclops, Rebecca Romijn's Mystique, Kelsey Grammer's Beast and Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler.

It's being read, reasonably, as a send-off: A chance to let the actors who fused with these roles for a generation take one more bow on the biggest stage Marvel can build, before the studio starts over with performers who've never worn the visor or the cape before.

Notably absent from that reunion, at least so far, is Jackman's Wolverine — a curious omission given that Deadpool & Wolverine just spent an entire film proving he still has box-office gravity in the role. Whether that's a deliberate choice to keep Logan separate from the Doomsday ensemble, a scheduling issue, or a detail Marvel hasn't revealed yet remains unclear.

The actual reboot, still without an official title, expected to begin filming in 2027 for a 2028 release, is where the real test begins. Jake Schreier, fresh off directing Thunderbolts*, is at the helm, working from a script by Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-creator Joanna Calo. Kevin Feige and casting director Sarah Finn have reportedly been meeting and testing actors for months, and the confirmed names so far skew young, and pointedly unconnected to the Fox lineage:

Apart from the trio, the picture turns speculative fast. Insider reports point to Marvel having settled on an actor for Professor X, deliberately bypassing the names that had circulated loudest, Bill Skarsgård, Tom Pelphrey, Christopher Abbott. Adam Driver's name keeps surfacing too, though nobody agrees on which role: Magneto, Mister Sinister, and William Stryker have all been floated for him at different points.

Further down the rumor mill sit names like Cailee Spaeny for Rogue, Jayme Lawson for Storm, Charles Melton for Beast, and Inde Navarrette for Mystique, none of it confirmed, all of it plausible enough that entertainment outlets keep running the same speculative rosters with the caveat that they'll update as news breaks.

Disney's D23 event, running August 14–16, 2026, is shaping up to be the moment much of this gets resolved one way or another. Marvel stayed conspicuously quiet on X-Men during its San Diego Comic-Con panel in July, which only raised the stakes for D23 — reportedly the studio's own internal deadline for locking down remaining deals.

Recasting a franchise is not new territory for Hollywood, or even for Marvel — Spider-Man alone has had three big-screen versions in twenty years. But the X-Men present a specific problem the wall-crawler never did: Fox's cast wasn't just competent, it was beloved as an ensemble, over a run long enough that actors aged into and out of roles in ways that felt like storytelling rather than contract negotiation.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender didn't erase Stewart and McKellen; First Class found a way to make young Xavier and young Magneto their own thing, helped enormously by a fifty-year age gap that made the "replacement" feel more like a prequel. Marvel doesn't have that luxury here. This isn't a prequel to Fox's films.

It's a full reset inside a shared universe that has spent over a decade training audiences to accept new actors playing old roles (three Hulks, two War Machines, two Rhodeys before that was even a joke), but rarely for characters this canonized by a single, decades-long performance.

The bet Marvel appears to be making, turning to actors like Sink and Connor, who arrive with their own fandoms built entirely outside the superhero genre, is that the way through isn't to find "the next Patrick Stewart" or "the next Hugh Jackman."

It's to stop trying to out-cast Fox altogether, and let a new generation of performers make these roles theirs from the ground up, the way McAvoy and Fassbender did, minus the built-in excuse of playing younger versions of someone else's performance.

Whether that works is, at this point, still a casting rumor away from being knowable. But the shape of the strategy is already visible: Say goodbye properly in Doomsday, then start clean, with actors chosen less for resemblance to what came before than for the specific gravity they already carry elsewhere. It's a gamble Fox never really had to make. Marvel's about to find out if it pays off.