Avengers: Doomsday Can Finally Give X-Men’s Leader the Respect He Deserves

In 2005’s Astonishing X-Men #8, Marvel’s Mighty Mutants discover one of their age-old enemies on the lawn of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, a giant mutant hunting robot called a Sentinel. While Wolverine, Colossus, and other heroes try to evacuate the school and beat the Sentinel in the usual way, Cyclops a.k.a. Scott Summers chooses a more extreme method. He pulls the visor off his face, unleashes his full optic blasts, and obliterates the foe.

“Every now and then, Summers…” says Wolverine, his look of shock and admiration clear in artist John Cassaday’s illustration. “I remember why you’re still in charge.”

That scene gets recreated in the third teaser for Avengers: Doomsday, which focuses on the X-Men. Set to the piano version of Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme, also used in the Captain America and Thor teasers for Doomsday, the camera moves through the dusty Xavier mansion to find Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) sitting together. The scene then cuts to James Mardsen as Cyclops, pulling off his visor and letting loose his optic blasts.

Although it brings back actors from 2000’s X-Men, the Doomsday teaser shows that much has changed since that movie released. In X-Men, Cyclops was at best a footnote, a milquetoast wet blanket to get in the way of the romance between Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey and Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine. By the time Mardsen’s Cyclops died in X-Men: The Last Stand, even the character’s fans were happy to see this bland rendition of the team leader put to rest.

In many ways, the 2000 movie’s treatment of Cyclops matched the status quo at the time. Introduced as the team leader in 1963’s X-Men #1, Scott Summers developed into a complex, mature character under writer Chris Claremont’s decade-plus run. Claremont intended for Summers to retire after the death of Jean Grey in the Dark Phoenix Saga, giving him a wife and a son. But when Marvel editorial decided to bring Jean back from the dead, against Claremont’s wishes, Cyclops was written as abandoning his family to return to his old girlfriend.

The decision ruined Cyclops as a character for decades, so much so that few complained when the animated X-Men series portrayed him as a dull block of wood. However, Cyclops was finally rehabilitated over the 2000s, starting with the aforementioned Astonishing X-Men series by Joss Whedon and Cassaday. Through that series, and especially the runs that followed by Warren Ellis, Mike Carey, and Brian Michael Bendis, Cyclops became a radical, a former child soldier so devoted to the cause of mutant liberation that he could accomplish what neither Professor X nor Magneto ever could.

These days, fans recognize Cyclops as a complex character, a highly competent strategist and morally principled hero, whose convictions sometimes make him clash with humans and mutants alike. In short, he’s a far cry from the guy that Marsden had to play in the Fox X-Men movies. If the X-Men scenes from Doomsday are borrowing from those moments from the comics, then the viewers will finally learn what even fan favorites like Wolverine always knew, that Cyclops deserves to lead this team.

Avengers: Doomsday arrives on December 18, 2026.