Kit Connor Is Marvel’s Pick For Cyclops in ‘X-Men’ Reboot

Little by little, a new X-Men cast is beginning to come together.

Jake Schreier (Thunderbolts) is the person in charge of this massive project. The casting rumors about his picks for the big roles keep dripping out. First we heard that Samara Weaving was the pick for Emma Frost, a former villain who has become one of the key members of the X-Men in the last decade or two. Now comes word (via Deadline) that Kit Connor — best known for the Netflix series Heartstopper — who is “the choice” to play Cyclops.

Of course, there already is a Cyclops, and in fact he will appear in a movie later this year. That’s the one played in the first trilogy of X-Men movies of the 2000s by James Marsden. He, along with numerous other alumni from the Fox X-Men franchise, will reprise their roles in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday, in which the multiverse is threatened by total destruction (and also by Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom, not necessarily in that order.)

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READ MORE: ScreenCrush’s Review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Cyclops has had a few periods of inactivity (and he even died for a short while around the release of the very first X-Men movie), but for most of the team’s 60+ year history, he has been a core member of the team and the series. After he and his fellow founding X-Men aged out of the central comic, they founded the team X-Factor. Then they returned to the X-Men in the 1990s, and he’s hung around in some shape or form basically ever since.

The fact that Marvel is looking to recast Cyclops with a new, younger actor to replace Marsden (who is now 52), makes it clear that however Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars shakes out, a totally new X-Men team will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not the old one from those earlier movies.

Marvel’s first X-Men movie does not have an official release date. The company said absolutely nothing about it at the recent San Diego Comic-Con, even as they announced several other movies for the first time. But if you’ve seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day, you know that it is clearly on its way eventually. (No spoilers here, obviously, even though Brand New Day is already one of the biggest movies of the decade.)