Discounting Deadpool 2‘s X-Force, which was played entirely for laughs, with the exception of the spinoffs, Fox’s X-Men franchise focused almost entirely on the core team for two decades until the series reached a disappointing conclusion when The New Mutants finally hit theaters this summer and landed with a thud.
The various sequels and reboots all centered on Charles Xavier’s group of gifted youngsters, who always tended to battle against either an opposing faction recruited by Magneto or shady government forces looking to eradicate or weaponize them. With the X-Men soon being rebooted once more and absorbed into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though, one of the main priorities for Kevin Feige and co. will be making sure that their approach sets itself as far apart as possible from the characters we’ve already seen thirteen times before.
In fact, insider Daniel Richtman now claims that the studio are looking to combat this problem by introducing multiple mutant teams into the long-running shared universe, which also massively increases the scope of storytelling possibilities and doesn’t leave the MCU completely reliant on just the X-Men. Not only that, but whenever Deadpool 3 eventually gets around to happening, all of the disparate mutants across the franchise could find themselves with even more connective tissue spread throughout the movies and Disney Plus shows.
There’ve been countless iterations in the comic books over the years, of course, with dozens upon dozens of different members, including X-Force, New Mutants, X-Factor, Excalibur, X-Terminators, Generation X and Marauders, so it isn’t as if they’d be short of options when it comes to expanding the roster far beyond the familiar likes of Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Iceman and the other figureheads of Xavier’s school. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see which other teams will be joining the main X-Men group.