The always engaging Patrick Stewart left the 2012 Montreal Comic Convention this year with an interesting nugget of information. It appears that, while hardly confirming if you pay close attention to his words, he’s confident that he’ll be playing Professor X again in a future X-Men film. From Newsarama:
If his recent nod at an Apple store seemed to suggest he’d be returning to the silver screen in the role of Professor X, when asked directly by a fan during his Q&A panel, the Englishman gave a knowing smile and spoke the words many have been waiting to hear: “I think there is every possibility.”
Interesting for a variety of reasons, chief among them that the role of the Professor belonged most-recently to James McAvoy in the excellent X-Men: First Class. Stewart’s no stranger to making cameos for the franchise, appearing at the tail end of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. So it’s possible that he’s been approached for The Wolverine but I highly doubt that. Allow me to explain.
We already know the upcoming sequel to First Class is entitled Days of Future Past in reference to Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s 1981 in Uncanny X-Men. That storyline saw an alternate timeline Kitty Pryde in a dystopian future where mutants are housed in internment camps. She resolves to transfer her consciousness back to present day in an effort to change the future.
But what if, instead of Pryde, Fox had designs on it being Professor Xavier who goes back in time? I’ve theorized for a while that the introduction of time-traveling to the series will allow Fox to hit a reset button made necessary by the mutant-eradicating ending of X-Men: The Last Stand. Furthering that notion, it allows the studio to get stars like Stewart, Hugh Jackman and Ian McKellen back into the franchise proper by merely resetting the timeline. So basically the Star Trek approach.
Could it be that Days of Future Past is really a reboot in disguise – one that’ll free up old guard X-Men like Wolverine to play in the same sandbox as the re-envisioned X-Men: First Class players? Time will tell, but Stewart seems pretty sure of the fact that his days as Xavier aren’t as over as we once thought. And it’s too late to argue. He’s already seen everything: