The X-Men and the trope of time travel are old friends. In fact, the idea of playing around with time to unexpected consequences has become such a reliable antic in the pages of X-Men that several members of the team and core allies are characters who have been displaced from potential futures, including Bishop and Cable.
X-Men lore is filled with countless alternate futures, numerous potentialities of how the story of mutantkind could turn out (usually for the worse). One of the most popular and iconic is Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan, a 2008-2009 storyline that saw Marvel’s favorite bad boy Wolverine turned into an aging relic who agrees to one last mission with a blind Hawkeye, traversing a twisted vision of the United States of America divided up into territories by supervillains. The original story arc served as the very loose basis for 2017’s Logan, but the continued adventures of that version of the character in the comics might end up providing justification for the MCU to keep the sole cinematic interpretation of the character along for a while. And now, that twisty storyline might be the basis for keeping Hugh Jackman in the MCU, even as a massive X-Men reset button is about to be pressed.
