Now that the X-Men are in the hands of Disney and Marvel Studios, the MCU should seriously consider updating the mutant metaphor to reflect current times. The best way to do that would be to once again use a Civil Rights allegory but to make one distinct change from previous X-Men movie adaptations in casting key characters.
Prior to the start of the MCU, the X-Men series was one of the most lucrative superhero franchises ever. Released in 2000, the first X-Men film was the start of a cultural infatuation with superheroes, even though at the time comic book fans criticized the film for its all-black leather costumes and perceived disregard for the source material. Despite those criticisms, the film was wildly successful and led to an even more successful sequel, helping to pave the way for our current superhero revolution alongside films like Sam Raimi's original Spider-Man trilogy. In recent memory, however, the Fox X-Men films have widely missed the mark and left fans eager for Marvel Studios to take over the franchise. While Logan served as a worthy send-off for the titular character, more recent outings like Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants have felt tired and a far cry from the exciting storytelling in a movie like Days of Future Past.
Ever since Disney bought out 21st Century Fox last year, comic book fans have wondered how the MCU would try and update the X-Men in a way that stands out from the work that Fox has already done. A simple but effective way to do this would be to take the mutant allegory and make it more literal by casting Professor X and Magneto as Black actors, making them children of the Civil Rights Movement.
When they were first created back in the 1960s, America was in the middle of a tumultuous social uprising that highlighted the racial disparity in the country. Though it wasn't originally intended by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the X-Men quickly went on to be seen as a powerful allegory for racial discrimination in America and across the world, mostly because of the similar oppression that mutants face at the hands of humankind. Despite them working as a force for good and seeking to protect humans, the X-Men are persecuted for no reason other than their identity as mutants (although most recently, Jonathan Hickman's House of X and Powers of X seek to challenge this status quo).
Professor X and Magneto have emerged at the forefront of this allegory due to their similarities with Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively. Charles Xavier's dream of a world in which mutants can peacefully coexist alongside humans has always struck a chord in its similarity with Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have A Dream" speech, and even though Professor X has become more sinister and calculating recently, it's his altruism and optimism that have become embedded in pop culture. Magneto, on the other hand, perfectly embodies Malcolm X's aggressive, "by any means" approach to dismantling the social hierarchy, and it's this radical gap in ideologies that often brings the two characters to blows.
For a long while, there have been questions raised about the logistics of Magneto being a Holocaust survivor in the present day, and while comics can explain it away with a shifting timeline and mutant genetics, movies don't necessarily have that same luxury. If Marvel were to recast Magneto and Professor X as Black men who grew up at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, they could preserve those same ideological differences while also literalizing the mutant allegory that makes the X-Men such a mainstay of pop culture. Many fan-casts have already picked Giancarlo Esposito as Charles Xavier, an inspired casting that reflects exactly the kind of social commentary an X-Men movie could tap into nowadays. Recasting Xavier and Magneto with a backstory tied into the Civil Rights Movement could make the MCU's X-Men reboot a socially resonant film on the same scale as Black Panther, and would certainly help to set it apart from Fox's treatment of the franchise.
