• Marvel Comics is launching the Midnight Universe, a horror-themed publishing line debuting in August 2025.
• Three launch titles will reimagine Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four in dark, terrifying new ways.
• Jonathan Hickman, Benjamin Percy, and Phillip Kennedy Johnson are among the superstar creators attached.
• Midnight Spider-Man’s mutation storyline runs parallel to what’s being teased in the MCU’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
• The line is Marvel’s most ambitious creator-driven horror push since the original New Universe.

Marvel Comics is going to a very dark place — and it’s bringing Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four with it.

The publisher has officially unveiled the Midnight Universe, a bold new horror-themed publishing line launching this August with three titles that take some of the most beloved characters in comics history and drag them somewhere they’ve never quite been before. The tagline says it all: “The Light Had Its Turn.”

The three launch titles are Midnight X-Men by Jonathan Hickman and artist Matteo Della Fonte, Midnight Fantastic Four by Benjamin Percy and Kev Walker, and Midnight Spider-Man by Phillip Kennedy Johnson alongside artist Scie Tronc — making his Marvel Comics debut. More titles are expected to be announced in the months ahead.

What the Midnight Universe Actually Is

Marvel Editor in Chief C.B. Cebulski framed the Midnight Universe as the next chapter in the publisher’s long tradition of bold alternate-world storytelling. “From the original New Universe to two Ultimate Universes, Marvel has a long history of creating and inspiring bold worlds filled with unforgettable characters and fresh ideas that feel new yet recognizable at the same time,” he said. “With the new Midnight line, we’ve given some of our most outstanding creators the opportunity to delve into the darkest corners of their imaginations and birth some of the creepiest, most terrifying takes on the Marvel Universe you’ve ever seen.”

The official description doesn’t pull punches: “The X-Men no longer fight for acceptance, they hunger for blood. The Fantastic Four venture into the unknown not to save the world — but to unleash terror upon it. And Spider-Man discovers that with great power… comes something monstrous.”

The line is described as interconnected through rich lore-building, with creators given free rein to push the stories wherever they want — “boundary-less, creator-driven storytelling” that Marvel says will keep readers on edge issue after issue. It’s being positioned as Marvel’s answer to DC’s wildly popular Absolute line, which has done enormous business by reimagining iconic heroes through a darker, more ambitious lens.

Breaking Down Each Title

In Midnight X-Men, the shadows of New York City are stalked by vampires and what Marvel calls the “mutant empyres.” A fragile peace between two species is on the verge of collapse, and an all-out war is coming — with the unturned caught in the middle. Hickman, who previously redefined mutantkind with House of X and more recently launched the acclaimed Ultimate Spider-Man, sounds genuinely lit up about this one. “I’m so enthusiastic about this project — it’s the most excited I’ve been in years,” he said. “The conceit of Midnight X-Men aligns perfectly with the kind of stories I like to tell. It has a rich, open-ended mythology that equally mixes old and new ideas into something that feels both familiar and original.”

Midnight Fantastic Four reimagines Marvel’s first family as something far more sinister: an obsessive scientist who pushes too far into the secrets of the universe, leaving himself and three others warped in horrible ways. Benjamin Percy, whose credits include Wolverine and Punisher, is writing it — and his description of signing on is peak horror-writer energy. “If you’ve read my work, you know that I see the world through a dark, disturbed lens. To me, it’s always midnight,” Percy said. “When Hickman called me, it was from a landline in the basement of an abandoned house with the wires cut. Blood poured from the receiver into my ear. I said yes.”

And then there’s Midnight Spider-Man. A young Peter Parker is transformed into a hideous spider hybrid by the ruthless Oscorp Corporation, which is hunting for the secret to eternal life. When Oscorp starts using the secrets unlocked by his mutation to create more human-animal hybrids, Peter embraces his grotesque new form to stop them. It’s a body-horror reimagining of one of the most familiar origin stories in pop culture — and Phillip Kennedy Johnson, fresh off Infernal Hulk, is writing it alongside debut Marvel artist Scie Tronc.

The Eerie Parallel to Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Here’s where things get genuinely interesting. The mutation angle in Midnight Spider-Man isn’t just a comics-only idea right now — it’s running parallel to what Marvel Studios is teasing for the MCU’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. In the film’s first trailer, Bruce Banner warns Peter that if his “DNA is mutating, it would be enormously dangerous.” Organic web-shooters appear to be coming too.

Spider-Man mutation isn’t new territory — Spider-Man: The Animated Series famously turned Peter into Man-Spider during its “Six Arms Saga” adaptation, and the comics storyline “The Other” saw him reborn from a cocoon with terrifying new abilities. But the fact that both the comics and the movies are leaning into this idea at roughly the same time feels like more than coincidence. It speaks to something Marvel clearly believes: that pushing Peter Parker to his most monstrous extreme is the freshest direction left to take him. After the massive success of the 2024 Ultimate Spider-Man series, Marvel has proven it can reinvent its flagship hero without losing what makes him matter.

The “Cloaked Covers” and What Comes Next

Marvel has already revealed the main cover for Midnight X-Men #1 by artist Dike Ruan — and it comes with a genuinely clever gimmick. The Midnight titles will feature “Cloaked Covers,” partially obscured artwork that only fully reveals itself when you turn the page. After the debut issues, that full artwork will remain hidden in shadow for subsequent covers, only giving itself up to readers brave enough to actually pick them up off the stands.

The full Midnight Universe line is set to roll out through Summer and Fall 2026, with more titles expected to be announced. Marvel has promised that characters like Blade and Werewolf by Night will also have a place in this world — so the three launch titles are just the beginning of whatever nightmare they’re building here.

“For over 80 years, Marvel heroes have inspired hope,” the publisher declared. “This August, that hope dies.”

The post Marvel’s Midnight Universe: Horror Versions of Spider-Man, X-Men & Fantastic Four appeared first on Cream.

• MCU X-Men writers are prioritizing “character-first storytelling” inspired by Chris Claremont’s legendary comic run
• Marvel’s new Midnight X-Men comic reimagines mutants as blood-hungry monsters — and fans aren’t sure it works
• Upcoming X-Men event series DNX may be setting up a major callback to Grant Morrison’s celebrated New X-Men run
• Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear’s Joanna Calo are writing the MCU reboot alongside director Jake Schreier
• Midnight X-Men #1 hits shelves August 5, 2026; the MCU film is rumored for a 2028 debut

It’s a big time to be an X-Men fan. Marvel’s mutants are front and center across comics and film right now — and the conversations happening around each project couldn’t be more different. One is full of genuine excitement. One is raising real questions about whether darker always means better. And one might be quietly setting up one of the most ambitious storytelling twists in recent X-Men comics history.

Let’s get into all of it.

The MCU Reboot Has a Clear Vision — and It Sounds Promising

The creative team behind Marvel Studios’ upcoming X-Men film has been talking, and what they’re saying is exactly what longtime fans have been waiting to hear. Director Jake Schreier — who helmed Thunderbolts* — brought in two of his collaborators from that film: Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear co-showrunner Joanna Calo. And in a recent interview with Men’s Health, Jin opened up about why he couldn’t say no to this one.

“I wasn’t planning on doing another Marvel thing because I do have a lot I want to explore in my personal projects,” he said. “But Jake is one of my best friends, and when he comes calling with X-Men… come on, you drop everything for that.”

Jin’s connection to the franchise runs deep. He grew up watching the animated series every Saturday morning, devoured X-Men ’97 when it arrived, and has a genuine love for Chris Claremont’s foundational comic run — the same run Schreier has cited as a key inspiration. That 1975 era of Uncanny X-Men introduced Storm, Nightcrawler, and Colossus to the world alongside Cyclops and Wolverine, and it remains the gold standard for what X-Men storytelling can be.

“What I’m excited about with Jake’s vision for the X-Men — and [Marvel president Kevin Feige and co-president Lou D’Esposito] are fully aligned with his vision — is that he wants to get back to focusing on the characters first,” Jin said. “These are amazing characters with very rich backstories full of so much emotion. There are so many intra-team dynamics and relationships. There’s soapy stuff. And sure, there are political themes baked into the DNA of X-Men too, and those are evergreen, but we want to get back to character-first storytelling.”

He also gave a rare glimpse into how hands-on the process has been: “We’ve been in the lab every day. It’s me, Joanna Calo, Jake, Kevin, and Lou. We’re in the trenches together and it’s invigorating.”

Feige’s involvement isn’t a surprise — he got his start as an associate producer on the original 2000 X-Men film, and mutants have been his unfinished business ever since. Reports suggest the lineup could mirror X-Men ’97, though there’s also talk of going back to the original “First Class” five. That question — teenage team or established heroes — may not be settled until the script locks in. The film doesn’t have an official release date yet, but shooting is rumored to begin this year ahead of a 2028 debut.

Midnight X-Men Has a Cool Premise With a Real Problem

While the MCU version is leaning into what makes mutants resonate, Marvel’s new comics initiative is doing something very different — and it’s already stirring debate before a single issue has hit shelves.

The Midnight Universe is Marvel’s new dark-reimagining line, positioned as an answer to DC’s Absolute Universe. The tagline: “hope dies in the shadows.” The first book out of the gate is Midnight X-Men, written by Jonathan Hickman — co-creator of Invincible — with art by Matteo Della Fonte. It’s set in a Manhattan where mutant factions and vampires are locked in a brutal territorial war. The cover of issue one shows a vampiric Storm and Nightcrawler mid-battle. The series description says these X-Men “no longer fight for acceptance” — instead, “they hunger for blood.”

As a premise for a What If? story, that’s genuinely interesting. As the flagship title for a new ongoing universe? It raises a harder question.

The X-Men have always worked because mutants are a metaphor — for racial minorities, for queer people, for anyone who’s ever been told they don’t belong. The franchise’s most enduring villains aren’t monsters; they’re politicians, pundits, and fear-mongers. That’s the engine. Turning mutants into literal blood-drinking predators in turf wars with vampires doesn’t just darken the story — it inverts the entire moral framework that makes X-Men meaningful. It arguably validates the worst things the franchise’s human antagonists have always said about mutants.

The comparison to DC’s Absolute Universe is also worth unpacking. What’s made that line work is that the darkness serves to illuminate something heroic underneath — characters stripped of everything still choosing to fight for something. The Midnight Universe, at least as described, doesn’t seem to offer that same counterweight. There’s no light to push against the shadow.

Midnight: X-Men #1 arrives in comic shops on August 5, 2026. It could absolutely surprise people. But right now, the concept is generating more skepticism than hype.

The DNX Event Might Be Hiding a Brilliant Twist

The most quietly fascinating X-Men story developing right now isn’t the darkest or the loudest — it’s the one with the most interesting theory attached to it.

Marvel’s next major X-Men event, DNX, spins directly out of the current X-Men (Vol. 7) run, which has pitted the team against a villainous organization called 3K. The group’s roster includes Cassandra Nova, Astra, Joseph, and Wire — but the big reveal is that the mastermind behind it all is Hank McCoy. The original Beast. A character who turned villainous during the Krakoa era and was presumed dead, now leading a scheme to release a deadly virus with the X-Men and the Fantastic Four standing in his way.

There’s a visual detail that’s caught a lot of attention: Beast’s fur has changed from his iconic blue to white. It’s a striking look — more feral, genuinely unsettling. But it’s also not new. The last time Marvel gave us a white Beast was 22 years ago, in the final arc of Grant Morrison’s legendary New X-Men run. That story, “Here Comes Tomorrow,” introduced a villain named Sublime — not a human, but a bacteriological lifeform that had been evolving on Earth for billions of years. Sublime took control of Beast, turning him into the Beast of Apocalypse and nearly ending the world in its attempt to seize the Phoenix Force.

X-Men editor Tom Brevoort has spoken openly about being a huge fan of Morrison’s run, and the current X-Men series has already pulled heavily from that era — Cassandra Nova being a key example. The white fur, the increasingly extreme behavior, the willingness to cross lines that Hank McCoy once held sacred — it’s all pointing somewhere. If DNX reveals that Beast’s worst actions weren’t entirely his own, that Sublime has been pulling strings again, it would be both a satisfying explanation for a character arc that many fans found hard to accept and a genuine payoff for readers who’ve been tracking these breadcrumbs.

It would also give one of Marvel’s original X-Men a path back — which, given everything the character has been through, feels overdue.

“This is the privilege of a lifetime,” Lee Sung Jin said about writing the MCU reboot. “It’s the coolest IP out there, in my opinion.” Whether you’re watching the comics or waiting for the film, it’s hard to argue with him right now.

The post X-Men Is Everywhere Right Now — Here’s What’s Happening appeared first on Cream.

• Alan Cumming called the X2 set environment “very, very wrong and very just unacceptable” in a new Deadline interview
• His comments are widely understood to reference director Bryan Singer, who has faced numerous misconduct allegations
• Cumming revealed Avengers: Doomsday has secret, unannounced characters — disguised under fake names in the script
• He confirmed he’s not in Doomsday very much, but had “a really lovely time” and still has additional scenes to shoot
• Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026, directed by the Russo brothers

Alan Cumming has some unfinished business with Nightcrawler — and some long-overdue things to say about what it cost him to play the character the first time around.

In a candid new interview with Deadline, the actor opened up about his experience on the 2003 set of X2, describing conditions that left a mark on him and his castmates that they’ve been talking about, quietly, for more than two decades. “There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” Cumming said. “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years.”

Cumming didn’t name director Bryan Singer by name, but the context makes it hard to misread. During X2’s production, cast members reportedly threatened a walkout over Singer’s behavior on set. Singer has faced multiple, well-documented allegations of misconduct throughout his career and has consistently denied wrongdoing. Cumming himself had previously spoken about the “hellish” makeup process — hours in the chair to become the blue-skinned, teleporting mutant — but his latest comments make clear that the makeup chair was only part of why he turned down X-Men: The Last Stand.

A Trauma Bond That Lasted 20 Years

What did come out of that difficult production, unexpectedly, was a group of people who genuinely love each other. Cumming told People last month that the shared ordeal forged bonds that have held strong ever since. “It’s one of those films where I think we all were so traumatized we were bonded in trauma, so we stayed in touch,” he said. He’s remained close with Ian McKellen, Rebecca Romijn, Patrick Stewart, and James Marsden — all of whom, notably, are returning alongside him in Avengers: Doomsday.

That reunion, it turns out, has been genuinely healing. “Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character,” Cumming told Deadline. “To go back and play him now and also this film is like superhero soup. There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up.”

He also had warm words for the Russo brothers, who are directing the film after their celebrated MCU run with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Civil War, Infinity War, and Endgame. “I really liked the brothers who directed it, and everyone was so nice.” Principal photography wrapped in September 2025, but Cumming confirmed he still has an additional shoot coming — so Nightcrawler’s role, small as it may be, isn’t entirely locked in yet.

Secret Characters, Fake Names, and Superhero Soup

Here’s where things get interesting for Marvel fans: Cumming let slip that the cast list we know isn’t the whole story. The scripts, he said, were deliberately obscured to keep certain returns under wraps. “Sometimes there were secret names in it because they didn’t want to let out that this certain character was coming back, so they called them somebody else in the script. It was so confusing.”

Given the swirling rumors — Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man among the most frequently cited — Cumming’s confirmation that there are surprises even the scoopers haven’t cracked will keep fans busy until a trailer finally drops. The latest word suggests one could arrive as soon as late May or mid-June.

The confirmed cast alone is already staggering: Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Kelsey Grammer as Beast, James Marsden as Cyclops, Channing Tatum as Gambit, Rebecca Romijn as Mystique, Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Florence Pugh as Yelena, and many more.

As for how much screen time Cumming actually gets amid all of that? He was refreshingly honest. “I’m not in it very much, but I really had fun and it was a really lovely thing to go back to.” He paused on that for a moment, then added something that’s hard not to smile at: “It’s kind of great being a superhero at 60. It’s not so bad.”

Avengers: Doomsday opens December 18, 2026.

The post Alan Cumming Calls X2 a ‘Horrible Experience’ — But Loves His Avengers: Doomsday Return appeared first on Cream.

• Chris Claremont guided the X-Men through nearly the entire 1980s, producing some of Marvel’s most enduring stories.
• “God Loves, Man Kills” tops the list for its modern relevance — it inspired the film X2 and still resonates today.
• “Days of Future Past” introduced alternate timelines to Marvel and remains one of the most adapted X-Men stories ever.
• The decade also gave us the Brood, the Mutant Massacre, and the origin of Cable — all still shaping X-Men comics in 2026.
• Several of these storylines directly connect to Marvel’s upcoming DNX event, making now the perfect time to revisit them.

The X-Men didn’t just survive the 1980s — they became the biggest thing in comics. Under writer Chris Claremont, who shepherded the team for nearly the entire decade, the mutant squad went from a cult favorite to a genuine cultural phenomenon. They fought alien empires, explored dystopian futures, and tackled themes that no superhero book had dared touch before. The stories they told in those ten years are still reverberating through Marvel Comics right now.

With Marvel’s next major X-Men event, DNX, spinning out of the current X-Men (Vol. 7) run and pulling in threads that go all the way back to this era, there’s never been a better moment to look back at where it all started. Here are the seven best X-Men storylines of the 1980s, ranked by how much they still matter today.

7. “Duel” — Storm Takes the Throne

It’s a single issue — Uncanny X-Men #201 from 1986 — but what happens inside it changed the team’s entire power structure. Storm had lost her powers by this point, but she wasn’t about to cede the leadership of the X-Men to anyone, including Cyclops. She challenged him to a duel. And then a depowered Ororo Munroe took his visor and made him submit.

Cyclops quit the team. Storm took over. That shift eventually set up the X-Men versus X-Factor rivalry that would define the rest of the decade, and it remains one of the cleanest, most satisfying single-issue character moments Claremont ever wrote.

6. “Mutant Massacre” — Marvel Gets Brutal

The mid-’80s were when Marvel decided the X-Men could handle real darkness, and “Mutant Massacre” was the proof. Mister Sinister sent his Marauders into the tunnels beneath New York City to slaughter the Morlocks — the underground community of mutants who couldn’t pass as human. They nearly succeeded. Thor and Power Pack joined the X-Men in a desperate attempt to stop it, and they still couldn’t prevent the carnage.

Angel had his wings so badly damaged that they had to be amputated. The Morlocks were nearly wiped out. And the story’s shadow stretched all the way into the ’90s, when it was revealed that Gambit had unknowingly helped lead the Marauders to the tunnels — a revelation that briefly got him exiled from the team. Mister Sinister, largely a background figure before this, emerged as one of the X-Men’s most dangerous villains. He still is.

The crossover ran through Uncanny X-Men #210-213, New Mutants #46, X-Factor #9-11, Thor #373-374, Power Pack #27, and Daredevil #238 — a sprawling, brutal event that still holds up as one of the great mutant stories.

5. “Inferno” — Everything Burns

“Inferno” is where the consequences of the entire decade came crashing together. Running from 1988 into 1989 across Uncanny X-Men #239-243, X-Factor #33-40, New Mutants #71-73, X-Terminators #1-4, and Excalibur #6-7, it was the payoff to storylines that had been building for years.

Cyclops had abandoned his wife Madelyne Pryor to reunite with the newly resurrected Jean Grey. Then Mister Sinister sent the Marauders to kill Madelyne and kidnap her infant son Nathan. The twist: Sinister had created Madelyne as a clone of Jean specifically to produce a powerful mutant child. Illyana Rasputin finally gave herself over to her Darkchylde form. Limbo began bleeding into Manhattan. And Nathan — sent to the future to survive a techno-organic virus — would eventually become Cable.

It’s one of the darkest corners of ’80s Marvel, and nearly every thread it pulled on is still being tugged at today.

4. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” — A Hero Actually Dies

Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe made superhero death feel like a temporary inconvenience, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” made it mean something. In 1980, Jean Grey — transformed into the near-omnipotent Phoenix — was manipulated by the Hellfire Club until something inside her broke. She flew into space and consumed a star, killing millions. The Shi’ar Empire arrived to demand justice. The X-Men fought the Imperial Guard for her life and lost.

Jean sacrificed herself. A genuine Marvel hero died on the page, and readers were stunned. The death was eventually retconned, but for its moment, nothing in superhero comics had hit that hard. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” remains the benchmark against which every X-Men story since has been measured — and most fall short.

3. “The Brood Saga” — X-Men as Horror Movie

The Brood arrived in Uncanny X-Men #155-167 (1982), with the core arc running through #161-167, and they were genuinely terrifying. An alien species that implanted queen embryos into living hosts — including Wolverine, whose healing factor meant the embryo couldn’t kill him fast enough — the Brood brought a body horror aesthetic to Marvel that the publisher had never really attempted at this scale.

Professor X died in this story. His mind survived only by being transferred into a cloned body. The Shi’ar, previously enemies of the X-Men, returned as uneasy allies alongside the Starjammers and Lilandra Neramani. Kitty Pryde stepped up into a leadership role. It’s one of the best horror stories Marvel produced in the entire decade, and the Brood have remained a fixture of the X-Men’s cosmic mythology ever since — still showing up to cause problems all these years later.

For anyone who’s never read classic X-Men, this is also one of the best entry points: a perfect blend of superheroes, science fiction, and genuine dread that doesn’t require a thick stack of back issues to understand.

2. “Days of Future Past” — The Template for Every Dark Future

Two issues. That’s all it took. Uncanny X-Men #141-142 (1981), by Claremont and John Byrne, opened in a 2013 America where Sentinels had exterminated most mutants and imprisoned the rest, and surviving heroes were scratching out an existence in the ruins. Kitty Pryde sent her consciousness back in time to try to stop the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly — the event that set the whole catastrophe in motion.

“Days of Future Past” invented the dystopian alternate future as a superhero genre staple. Every dark timeline story that came after it — in comics, in film, in television — owes something to these two issues. The story was adapted as the backbone of the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past, and the timeline itself never went away in the comics. It still exists. The shadow it casts is enormous.

1. “God Loves, Man Kills” — The One That Explains Everything

If you want to understand why the X-Men matter — not just as a superhero team, but as a cultural idea — this is the story to read. Published in Marvel Graphic Novel #5 (1982) by Claremont and artist Brent Eric Anderson, “God Loves, Man Kills” introduced William Stryker: a televangelist who built a movement around the belief that mutants were servants of Satan, and whose Purifiers murdered mutant children to cleanse the world of what he called evil.

The story works as a direct examination of how charismatic leaders use religion and fear to turn society against a persecuted minority. It forces Magneto — a Holocaust survivor who has every reason to despise humanity — into an uneasy alliance with the X-Men, because even he recognizes that what Stryker is doing looks familiar. It ends when Stryker tries to kill a mutant child on live television and the world finally sees him for what he is.

Over 44 years after its publication, it reads like it was written last week. It was the direct inspiration for the film X2, which reimagined Stryker as a paramilitary scientist rather than a reverend but kept the essential engine of the story intact. No other X-Men story from the decade — or arguably from any decade — captures what the mutants are really a metaphor for with this kind of precision and power.

And with DNX on the horizon, pulling in villains and concepts that trace back through decades of X-Men history, the foundation that Claremont built in the ’80s has never felt more load-bearing. These stories aren’t just classics. They’re still the blueprint.

The post The 7 Best X-Men Stories of the ’80s, Ranked appeared first on Cream.

• Alan Cumming confirms Avengers: Doomsday has secret characters disguised under fake names in the script
• The actor, returning as Nightcrawler, says he’s not in the film very much but loved the experience
• Cumming called his X2 experience “shocking” and praised the Russo brothers for the much warmer Doomsday set
• Rebecca Romijn also described a “surreal” day on set with 35 cast members filming together
• A first trailer for Doomsday is rumored for late May or mid-June, with the film hitting theaters December 18

Alan Cumming is back in the blue makeup — and he’s got some things to say. The Scottish actor, returning as Nightcrawler in Avengers: Doomsday after more than two decades away from the role, sat down with Deadline this week and dropped a few revelations that Marvel fans are going to be chewing on for a while. Chief among them: the cast list you’ve seen isn’t the full picture.

“Sometimes there were secret names in it because they didn’t want to let out that this certain character was coming back, so they called them somebody else in the script,” Cumming told Deadline. “It was so confusing.”

That’s a tantalizing detail for a film that already has one of the most stacked ensemble casts in superhero movie history. The confirmed lineup alone reads like a greatest-hits collection — Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom, Anthony Mackie as Captain America, Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards, Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, and on and on. If Marvel was still hiding characters under fake names in the script, whatever’s coming could be genuinely unexpected.

Cumming painted the whole production as controlled chaos. “This film is like superhero soup,” he said. “There’s so many of them in it. I just can’t keep up. Also, they’re really hard scripts to read — superhero films — because it’s all action and then the names… everyone’s got two names.”

A Much Better Set Than Last Time

For Cumming, returning to Nightcrawler at all required getting past some genuinely bad memories. He originated the role in Bryan Singer’s X2 in 2003 — a film that, behind the scenes, was a rougher experience than most fans knew at the time. He declined to reprise the role for X-Men: The Last Stand, citing the grueling hours-long makeup process, but the set environment was clearly a factor too.

“There were things that happened on the [X2] set that were just shocking to me,” he said. “The working environment was very, very wrong and very just unacceptable. And we all have talked about it in various ways over the years.” Cumming didn’t name Singer directly, but the director’s well-documented on-set behavior during the X-Men era has been a matter of public record for years.

Doomsday, by contrast, sounds like it was a genuine pleasure. “Going back to it after all these years was great because I really liked the character,” Cumming said, adding that he was particularly taken with the Russo brothers. “I really liked the brothers who directed it, and everyone was so nice. And we shot it at Pinewood.”

The production wrapped principal photography in September 2025, but Cumming revealed he still has work left to do. “I’ve actually got to do another bit of filming on it” — a small detail that suggests the Russos are still fine-tuning the film’s massive ensemble even now.

As for how much Nightcrawler fans will actually get to see of him? Cumming was refreshingly honest: “I’m not in it very much, but I really had fun and it was a really lovely thing to go back to.” He added, with evident delight: “It’s kind of great being a superhero at 60. It’s not so bad.”

35 People on Set and a Moment No One Will Forget

Cumming isn’t the only returning X-Men cast member reflecting on the experience. Rebecca Romijn, who plays Mystique in Doomsday, spoke to Collider while promoting Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and described a specific day on set that clearly left a mark.

“That was a very surreal day. I’ll never forget it,” she said of a shoot that brought roughly 35 cast members together at once. “There were two days back-to-back where we were all just kind of looking at each other, going, ‘This is crazy.’ It was very surreal.” For Romijn, returning to a character she hadn’t played in 20 years — and doing it alongside both old X-Men castmates and the new generation of MCU heroes — made the whole thing feel almost unreal. “Very surreal and very exciting,” she said.

According to footage screened at CinemaCon last month (but not yet released publicly), Romijn’s Mystique gets at least one memorable scene — squaring off against Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, apparently shapeshifting into her. It’s exactly the kind of wild cross-franchise collision that makes this movie feel like nothing Marvel has attempted before.

A rumor circulating among fans also suggests that most of the original X-Men didn’t survive the film’s incursion storyline — with Mystique, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Professor X, Magneto, Beast, Gambit, Wolverine, Deadpool, and one unidentified character among the survivors. Take that with appropriate skepticism, but it does line up with Cumming’s admission that his screen time is limited.

The Russo brothers — back in the MCU for the first time since Avengers: Endgame — are directing from a screenplay by Michael Waldron and Stephen McFeely. A first trailer is reportedly coming before the end of May, or at the latest in mid-June. Avengers: Doomsday opens in theaters December 18.

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