Marvel Already Told You the X-Men Plot: Adam Driver's Alias Points Straight to Mr. Sinister

Marvel did not announce a mystery villain for its X-Men movie at D23. When Adam Driver opened with a joke about playing Magneto and then gave his real character name, Nathaniel Milbury, he was naming an alias of Mr. Sinister, and in doing so Marvel announced the plot out loud while the room was still laughing.

Somebody told me recently that I should do more news, get out in front of announcements and be first. I thought about it for a week and the answer is no. Not because news is beneath us, but because being first is worth about six hours, and as one person doing a lot I would lose that race every time. So I am starting something called Developing instead. When a movie is a year or two out and the news arrives one piece at a time, I hold a picture of what I think the movie actually is. Every time a new name lands, that picture either gets sharper or it breaks, and it all goes on a board with dates so you can hold me to every word. The first board is X-Men.

Adam Driver's D23 joke hid Mr. Sinister in plain sight

Back in August, Marvel put the X-Men cast on a stage at D23, six names at once. At the end, Adam Driver came on by video link and opened with a joke: he said he was playing Magneto. The room laughed. He let it sit for a second, then said the actual name, Nathaniel Milbury, and the room kept laughing. Then everybody went home.

For the last month, the internet has been arguing about whether Samara Weaving is the right Emma Frost. Nobody looked up Milbury. I did. It is not a made up name. It is an alias belonging to Nathaniel Essex, the character you may know as Mr. Sinister. The villain is Mr. Sinister, and he was announced in the joke slot.

Mr. Sinister's obsession is Scott Summers and Jean Grey

Sinister is not a guy who shows up and fights the team. He has exactly one interest, and he has had it since 1987: Scott Summers and Jean Grey. Not the X-Men in general, those two specifically, genetically. In the comics he grows a woman named Madelyne Pryor out of Jean's cells, gives her a fake life, plants her in Alaska next door to Scott's parents, and waits for Scott to fall in love with her so the two of them will have a baby. The baby is what he actually wanted.

He tells Cyclops this to his face in X-Factor number 39. He caused the plane crash. He put Scott in the orphanage. He had Scott's brother adopted out so Scott would be alone and easier to handle. He ran the orphanage, and he lived next door under this exact name. That is why I say the plot was announced at D23 and nobody noticed.

Sadie Sink and Kit Connor are the bloodline Sinister wants

If that is who the villain is, go back and look at the order in which they hired people. Jean Grey was not announced at D23. Sadie Sink was already cast, and she was seeded in a Spider-Man movie a whole film early, before a single other mutant existed on screen. Then came Scott Summers with Kit Connor. Those are the two halves of the thing Sinister spends 40 years trying to breed.

Look at who they got. Sink's most famous scene, the one everybody knows, is a girl being taken over from the inside and dragged back out by a memory. That is not a coincidence when the character has a cosmic firebird in her future.

Connor is the one people are underrating. Everybody knows him from Heartstopper, which is pure decency, and that is the Cyclops everyone thinks they are getting. But he was also in Warfare, which is two hours of men holding it together while they are terrified. They hired someone who can play the boy scout and the commander cracking underneath at the same time. I think that is the whole part, and I think the movies have never once given it to him. Fox used Cyclops as the other guy in a love triangle so Wolverine would look better, then killed him off screen and left his sunglasses in the dirt. This is not that. The Summers and Grey bloodline is the spine of this movie.

Samara Weaving's Emma Frost points to the story after Jean

That brings me to the casting everybody is actually mad about. The comments around Samara Weaving are full of claims that they could not afford Margot, and people listing who should have gotten the part. Nobody arguing about this is asking why Emma Frost is in the movie at all, because she does not need to be.

If you are doing Dark Phoenix, the Hellfire Club is enough. Emma shows up in 1980, kidnaps the team, Jean physically takes her apart, and she is out of the story. She is the opening move, not a requirement. She is only required if you are doing the other story, the one where Scott Summers and Emma Frost end up together after Jean dies. In that story, Emma is the person who tells Scott the truth about himself: that all his control is not discipline, it is fear.

You cannot cast that cold, and that is the mistake everyone makes with Emma, playing her frozen. Emma is funny. That is her weapon. She says the cruelest accurate thing in the room, it lands like a joke, and you laugh before you realise what she did to you. Samara Weaving does exactly that for a living. They cast the voice, not the fan cast.

Christopher Abbott's Xavier is cast to be distrusted

The biggest tell in the whole cast, in my view, is one I have seen almost nobody talking about: Charles Xavier, played by Christopher Abbott, who is 40. Look at his work: Poor Things, It Comes at Night, James White, Wolf Man. He plays quiet men, and specifically quiet men where the quiet is a lid on something, and you spend the movie unsure whether he is the safe one.

You do not hire that actor to play a kind, bald man in a wheelchair who believes in the dream, and you should not, because that Xavier has been gone from the comics for, I don't know, 20 years. Marvel publishes an article on its own website called the worst things Professor X has ever done. He faked his own death and let his students grieve him for two years. He kept using the Danger Room after he knew it was alive and in pain. He sent a second team of kids to die on an island, then reached into Scott Summers' head and deleted his own brother out of it. That is the version you hire Christopher Abbott for.

Put that next to Sinister. One man edits genes to make better people. The other edits minds to make better people. Both did it to Scott Summers when he was a kid, and neither one asked. Xavier is cast to be distrusted.

Storm and Rogue are runway hires

Storm is played by a Broadway star with almost no screen credits, and if you have never heard of her, that is kind of the point. People are reading that as Marvel being cheap. I read it as Marvel finally admitting something. Halle Berry is an Oscar winner, and they gave her four movies of nothing. Star casting did not produce a good Storm. It produced a famous person standing in the background saying one line about toads.

Storm has to deliver dialogue that is basically liturgy without it turning into camp, and that is a stage skill. Comic Storm does not take over the team for five years, does not fight for the leadership for eight, and does not lose her powers until year nine. You cannot cast a movie star that young into an arc that only pays off in the third film. You buy runway.

I read Rogue the same way. The actress cast is best known right now for Obsession, but Rogue comes with more baggage than anybody else in this cast, and I mean that as a compliment. She has two adoptive mothers who are supervillains. She has the Carol Danvers history, where she touched Captain Marvel too long, permanently took her powers, her memories and her whole personality, and then had to share her own head with her. The MCU already has a Carol Danvers. Storm and Rogue are runway hires, and Rogue's fuse is already lit.

Asa Germann is an Archangel hire, not a 1963 Angel

The last name so far landed on the 10th: Asa Germann. The 1963 Angel is the least interesting X-Man ever created. He is a rich, handsome guy with wings, and that is the whole character for about 15 years. So you would expect them to cast a rich, handsome guy.

Instead they cast the actor from Gen V, where he is known for playing a young man with reality breaking powers and serious psychiatric damage who spent the show institutionalised. That is not a trust fund hire, because there is a second version of Angel, the one everybody actually remembers. His wings get pinned to a wall and turn gangrenous. Someone who works for his own team gets a court order to amputate them against his will. He gets on his private jet, the jet has been sabotaged, and Apocalypse picks him up seconds before it explodes and rebuilds him with metal. Archangel: the pretty one taken apart and handed back as a weapon. That is the hire they made.

Jake Schreier makes films where the damage is the plot

Then there is the man running all of it, Jake Schreier. His last movie was Thunderbolts, a Marvel tentpole that is, I don't know, secretly about depression. Before that he did Beef, which is two people destroying their entire lives over a parking space. He makes things about damaged people where the damage is the actual plot.

Line it all up. A director whose last film was about depression. A Jean Grey famous for being occupied from the inside. An Xavier played by a man you are not sure you should trust. An Emma Frost who gets inside people. An Angel known for playing a young man whose powers are a psychiatric condition. And a villain who is a scientist obsessed with designing people, played by one actor, the only actor in this entire cast they paid for. Every hire points at the same thing.

No Magneto and no Sentinels means this is not a persecution story

The part that actually convinced me is what is not there. No Magneto, no Sentinel, no Trask, no Stryker, no registration act. Not one villain who wants mutants gone has been announced. Every X-Men movie since 2000 has told the same story: will they let us exist? That story needs somebody who wants mutants gone, and this cast does not have one.

"Sinister isn't a bigot. He's a fan." He does not want mutants dead; he wants mutants made. He does not hate Scott Summers; he collects him. That one swap changes what the movie is even about. The question is no longer whether the world will accept us. It is who made me, and do I belong to them.

No Beast and no Iceman means this is not an origin story

One more absence settles a different argument. There is no Beast and no Iceman. Half the internet has decided this is the original five assembling, and people are kind of demanding those two get cast to complete the set. You cannot do the original five without Beast and Iceman. That is not an opinion, that is arithmetic.

Everything we have been told is that Jean arrives at a school that is already open, with Storm and Rogue already there and Xavier already running it. The team exists before the movie starts. That is the X-Men '97 move: open after the origin with the team already broken in. X-Men '97 is arguably the best received X-Men anything in 20 years, and it is not an origin. We are dropping in midstream.

What would confirm the Sinister theory, and what would break it

That is the board as it stands, and I want to set the rules now. I am not going to chase every announcement the day it drops. When a new name lands, I will read it the same way, and the picture either gets sharper or breaks. If it breaks, I am not quietly deleting anything; it stays on the board with a stamp on it.

Here is what I am keeping an eye on. If they cast Madelyne Pryor, this is confirmed and it is not close. If they cast Cable, same thing. Mystique or Destiny would drag Rogue's whole manufactured childhood into it. Apocalypse matters because Sinister only exists because Apocalypse made him.

Here is what kills it. Beast and Iceman get cast and we are back to the team origin. Magneto shows up in a big role and the civil rights story is back on. A Sentinel walks through a wall and the villain stops being the interesting one. Wolverine gets cast and this stops being Cyclops's movie, because it always does. If any of those land, I will come back and say I got it wrong.

Scott Summers finally gets to be the main character

There is normally a score at the end of my pieces, but there is none today. You cannot score a movie that does not exist yet, so I am not putting a number on a cast list. The board is the score on this one.

Here is where I keep landing. The character Marvel just built this entire movie around is the one nobody in Hollywood has ever known what to do with. They benched him three separate times so the guy with the claws could have the scene. They killed him off screen and left his sunglasses in the dirt. Now the villain, the school, the woman he loves and the woman he will love after her are all pointing at Scott Summers. "He finally gets to be the main character. He just doesn't get to be a person."

So tell me what breaks it, not what you want to happen: what single announcement would make me admit I read this whole thing wrong?