The unusual factor about Marvel’s present run is how little it throws away. Avengers: Doomsday arrives on December 18, 2026, with a forged reaching again 1 / 4 century, pulling in Patrick Stewart’s Professor X, Ian McKellen’s Magneto, and James Marsden’s Cyclops, all of them reprising roles they final performed for a unique studio. Marvel’s personal X-Males movie follows in Might 2028, with a contemporary forged for 4 extra of the workforce, Jean Gray and Cyclops and Rogue and Storm amongst them. Between the 2, nearly each hero who mattered on display within the 2000s has a approach again in. Marvel has spent this stretch reopening doorways relatively than closing them, and the result’s a slate on which nearly no person from the final twenty years is completely out of play, nonetheless lengthy they’ve been gone or nonetheless badly their final look landed.
Nearly. A handful of characters carried actual weight twenty years in the past, appeared throughout a number of movies and anchored video video games, and have merely not come again. Some had been quietly demoted. One had two separate solo motion pictures developed and deserted. The most important title right here was given up on six weeks in the past, on the document, by the actor who spent seven years ready to play him. These are 5 Marvel heroes who had been unavoidable within the 2000s and haven’t had an actual display position since. What hyperlinks the 5 beneath just isn’t obscurity. Every one was a real headline character in its second, with the advertising spend and the merchandise shelf to show it, and every has since fallen off the board for a cause that’s particular and documented relatively than mysterious. The explanations are all completely different, and none of them is that the character stopped working. Two of them are, on paper, nonetheless accessible to anyone who desires them.
5) Jubilee
Jubilee is the teenage mutant who fires bursts of explosive vitality from her arms, and for anybody who grew up on the comics or the animated sequence, she was the door into the X-Males, the bizarre child who wandered onto a superhero workforce. Fox understood the title was value having. She turns up in three movies throughout the 2000s, X-Males in 2000, X2 in 2003 and X-Males: The Final Stand in 2006, and all three give her a reputation badge and nearly nothing else. She is within the background of the mansion, and that’s the position.
Her one actual second got here a decade later in X-Males: Apocalypse, performed by Lana Condor, in a mall sequence that runs about so long as this paragraph and exists principally to let 4 youngsters be youngsters. Condor has since stated she has spoken with the reboot workforce about coming again, however nothing has been introduced. The extra telling reality just isn’t the hole. It’s that 4 movies in, Jubilee has nonetheless by no means had a scene that belonged to her.
4) Colossus
Colossus is the Russian farm boy who can flip his pores and skin to natural metal, one of many few X-Males whose energy is solely defensive, and Daniel Cudmore performed him thrice: X2 in 2003, The Final Stand in 2006, and Days of Future Previous in 2014. In these movies he’s muscle and conscience, the large quiet one who carries folks out of buildings. What occurred subsequent is a particular type of disappearance, and it’s value separating from the others on this listing, as a result of the character didn’t cease present. He received reassigned.
Colossus continues within the Deadpool movies as a totally digital character voiced by Stefan Kapicic relatively than performed by Cudmore, and his operate there’s to be the straight man who disapproves of Ryan Reynolds’ jokes. He was nonetheless doing that job in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024. He isn’t on the Avengers: Doomsday forged listing and has not been forged within the 2028 reboot. So the final model anybody performed straight was twelve years in the past, and the one which survived is a punchline supply system.
3) Kitty Pryde
Kitty Pryde, additionally referred to as Shadowcat, can section via stable matter, and he or she is the rationale X-Males: Days of Future Previous works in any respect. That movie’s complete construction runs on her. She is the one who sends Wolverine’s consciousness again via time after which has to bodily maintain him there whereas the longer term collapses round her which implies each scene set in 1973 exists as a result of Kitty is concentrating in 2023. Take her out and there’s no film. She had already carried a considerable position in The Final Stand seven years earlier.
Fox knew what it was sitting on with Kitty, too, and twice tried to construct a movie round her: first a solo challenge with Deadpool director Tim Miller connected, then a second try written by the veteran Marvel comics author Brian Michael Bendis. Neither received made, the studio modified arms, and each quietly evaporated. It has now been twelve years since she was on display, she just isn’t in Doomsday, and he or she was not among the many mutants named for the 2028 reboot.
2) Iceman
Bobby Drake, the mutant who can freeze something he touches, appeared in additional 2000s X-Males movies than many of the precise workforce. Shawn Ashmore performed him in X-Males in 2000, X2 in 2003 and The Final Stand in 2006, then got here again for Days of Future Previous in 2014, which is 4 appearances throughout a franchise that solely made six movies in that complete stretch. He was not a background mutant both. Bobby led the teenage half of the story, the scholars relatively than the troopers, and the scene in X2 the place he tells his mother and father what he’s, and his mom asks whether or not he has tried not being a mutant, is the second a variety of followers nonetheless title first once they speak about what these movies received proper. Then nothing, for twelve years. Ashmore has confirmed that Marvel by no means contacted him and that he’s not in Avengers: Doomsday, and Iceman was not among the many mutants forged for the 2028 reboot both.
1) Blade
Nothing else on this listing is shut. Wesley Snipes’ Blade, a half-vampire who hunts vampires, arrived in 1998 and did one thing no Marvel character had managed: he made the corporate’s title work on the field workplace. Blade grossed $131 million on a $45 million price range, Blade II made $155 million, and Blade: Trinity made $132 million in 2004. There was a 13-episode Spike TV sequence in 2006, a PlayStation sport, a Sport Boy Coloration port, and a soundtrack that reached quantity 36 on the Billboard 200. Marvel, which had not but labored out what it was sitting on, took a flat payment of $25,000 for the primary movie.
Then twenty years with no main position. Snipes got here again for a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, which set a Guinness World Document for the longest hole between appearances as a Marvel character, and that’s the entire of it. Marvel introduced a reboot with Mahershala Ali at San Diego Comedian-Con in 2019, and over the subsequent 5 years it burned via two administrators, 5 credited writers, 4 launch dates, and a Mia Goth casting because the vampire goddess Lilith earlier than pulling the movie off the schedule fully in October 2024. On July 31, 2026, Ali lastly stated out loud what the delays implied. “You had me beneath contract; they’ve billions of {dollars},” he stated. “In the event that they needed to do the film, we might’ve completed the film. They didn’t need to do it.” Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, days earlier, had described by no means getting the movie off the bottom with Ali as one among his personal failures.
Personally, Blade is the one which stings, and Marvel did have an actual downside right here. Ali is an Oscar winner who was by no means going to attend endlessly, and forcing out a model no person believed in would have been worse than shelving it. However the numbers are the numbers. That first movie tripled its price range in 1998, again when a Marvel film opening in any respect was an open query, and it did it with an R ranking and a Black lead in a style that had neither. Marvel took $25,000 for it. Twenty-eight years on, the corporate that owes Blade its existence nonetheless can not work out what to do with him.
The sample throughout all 5 is similar, and it isn’t a narrative about audiences dropping curiosity. Each one among these characters was sidelined by one thing occurring above them: rights offers, a studio altering arms, a franchise reshuffling itself round whoever was accessible. Fox bought to Disney and a complete mutant bench went into storage. Marvel spent seven years on a Blade movie it by no means made. None of that has something to do with whether or not folks needed to see Kitty Pryde section via a wall once more.