It’s Too Late for Comic-Accurate Costumes to Save the X-Men | Avengers: Doomsday – IGN

Things are heating up for the MCU, since we now have our first looks at many of the key players who will be appearing in Avengers: Doomsday. Not only did we get to see artwork of Robert Downey, Jr.’s Doctor Doom at the 2026 Disney Marketing Expo in Shanghai, China, depicting the Fantastic Four and Avengers nemesis in his regal green cloak and metal suit from the comics, but we now have a better look at the rest of the cast because of a leak from the Doomsday set. Bags handed to production members included illustrations of the same group of 27 characters we learned about from the cast reveal video earlier this year, with the addition of a young Franklin Richards, who audiences first met in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It’s an exciting moment for fans, but one particular reveal has generated a lot of discussion online.

AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY promo art featuring first look at the X-Men’s costumes 👀 pic.twitter.com/ESHQaoSXLt

— Ben Geskin (@BenGeskin) September 21, 2025

For the Fox X-Men characters, the leak shows that their costumes will harken back to their looks from the comics. There seems to be a distinct ’90s influence to the designs, which makes sense because of the popularity of X-Men ’97 and Jim Lee’s iconic artwork for the team. After years of asking for more comic-accurate costumes in Fox’s X-Men movies, it looks like Marvel Studios is finally giving fans what they want with these designs. But is it too little too late? Using these costumes now when Fox’s versions of the characters are likely being put out to pasture after Avengers: Secret Wars as Marvel preps their X-Men reboot from New Avengers director Jake Schreier feels like a pittance after the X-Men movies spent two decades having mostly disdain for the more fantastical aspects of the source material.

Let’s take a look at why using comic costumes for Doomsday’s X-Men is too little, too late.

Fixing the Fox-Men

Although Fox’s X-Men franchise ran for many films and was even canonized into the MCU by Deadpool & Wolverine’s multiversal shenanigans, the issues with the series have been pretty consistent ever since Bryan Singer’s first entry back in 2000. There was a lack of respect for the comic books these characters came from, diluting their bright and colorful outfits into dull and generic black combat suits. The films messed up multiple big storylines from the comics such as the Dark Phoenix Saga (twice!) and the rise of Apocalypse. The film called X-Men: First Class didn’t actually have the original first class of X-Men in it, and many beloved characters such as Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde received small roles in the series that didn’t reflect how important they are to the X-Men mythology.

That’s not to say Fox’s X-Men doesn’t have historical significance, since the first X-Men predated Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After Batman & Robin’s critical and financial disappointment in 1997, X-Men getting solid reviews and making a profit three years later was a turning point for the genre. But beyond a handful of celebrated casting decisions like Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Ian McKellen as Magneto, and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, the X-Men movies became a bizarre side note as better received and more comic-accurate superhero films took their place in the market. Even when other filmmakers like Matthew Vaughn and Simon Kinberg directed mainline entries, the X-Men series never quite escaped Bryan Singer’s uninspired aesthetic, turning one of the most vibrant corners of the Marvel universe into visual sludge.

To use comic costumes now after all that baggage feels less like an overdue correction than a desperate ploy. Even when the series wasn’t under Disney’s purview, the X-Men movies teased fans with better outfits they didn’t really use. X-Men: Apocalypse (the sixth mainline X-Men film, mind you), had the team wearing more colorful outfits in the final scene, only for them to be discarded by the next installment. Seeing characters like Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Mystique wearing more comic-accurate costumes is neat in a vacuum, but this should’ve been done 25 years ago. Doing it now simply doesn’t have the same impact, and it’s not a great sign for how Doomsday intends to treat its audience.

The Nostalgia Curse

I’ve been banging this drum for a while here at IGN but I’m doing it again: The MCU’s obsession with nostalgia is a blight on the franchise. What was once one of the most exciting blockbuster properties during the Infinity Saga has devolved into a self-defeating mess in the Multiverse Saga, with Marvel Studios largely trading their previous focus on strong structure, characterization, and respect for the source material in for a glut of content that serves to remind you of other things to distract from a lack of substance in what you’re actually watching. Even when the movies are good, Marvel pilfering characters from previous franchises like Sony’s Spider-Man movies or Fox’s X-Men films has become a crutch they’ve relied on to the point of absurdity, gutting the MCU’s narrative integrity for cheap nostalgia plays.

Putting ancient castings for X-Men characters in the costumes they should’ve been wearing decades ago only further plays into this mentality. It highlights not just the mistakes Fox has made in the past, but the mistakes Marvel is still making in the present. Even though Phases 4 and 5 have included teases of the Fox universe crossing over with the mainline MCU in Multiverse of Madness, The Marvels and Deadpool & Wolverine (even if that last one conspicuously didn’t import its leads into the MCU’s Sacred Timeline at the end), the projects have been so scattered in terms of direction and quality that not a lot of this has felt like natural build-up to the X-Men showing up in Doomsday. Whether they’re major players or just easy targets for Doctor Doom to wipe out to establish his threat level, the MCU hasn’t built enough investment in these hand-me-down X-Men to make their appearance matter to the audience.

So what’s left? The baseline pleasure of seeing Cyclops sporting a costume that has blue and yellow in it? The image of Magneto’s helmet having some purple in its lining? The thought of Mystique actually wearing clothes for once? Because frankly, those things should be par for the course, not selling points. Iconic characters finally looking like themselves being talked about as a reason to be excited for Doomsday just goes to show how poorly these characters have been treated in the past. I’m not even talking about characterization or performances anymore. I’m just happy they aren’t wearing terrible outfits. It sets the bar so low, but Doomsday should have to do more than simply have these characters show up and look right to be considered a worthy adaptation of them. And that’s something Marvel should take very seriously given that they plan to introduce their own X-Men soon enough.

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