Is Halle Berry Back as Storm for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’?

There likely won’t be another film franchise like FOX’s X-Men. They adapted a wildly successful property for a comic book company that had to sell off a lot of its property rights to keep the lights on. Decades have passed and that same company that almost went bankrupt has since been purchased by an even bigger company and they won’t be selling off the characters they own anytime soon. That doesn’t mean they won’t take advantage of all the leg work FOX did for them by using the team and their characters to dominate cinemas for over a decade.

We saw the MCU dip its toe into the pool with last year’s Deadpool Ampersand Wolverine. They resurrected Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and dragged him sweating, bleeding, and swearing into Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. Disney+ saw the debut of X-Men 97, which continued the adventures of the popular early ’90s cartoon. Those were both two years after the folks at Disney had included the cartoon’s music sting in the Ms. Marvel miniseries and brought back Patrick Stewart to play Professor X in Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Now, the company is digging up even more mutants.

Coincidentally, much of what the MCU has been attempting with their marches into the multiverse was accomplished in X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014. While not a multiverse story, it brought superhero actors together who would have otherwise never interacted onscreen. It also incentivized people who enjoyed the old X-Men cast to try the new one. That’s what Marvel is doing now. The MCU has gotten stale, so they’re trying to breathe new life into it with older characters. While they attempted that in Deadpool’s last outing, many returning characters were kept secret. That is not the case with Avengers: Doomsday (that we know of).

Marvel had a big ole YouTube event last week where they slowly but surely unveiled the names of several Avengers returning for the new film. They also revealed that a whole team of older X-Men would join them. Names like James Marsden, Rebecca Romijn, and Alan Cumming were among a host of surprise returns. There could be more surprises on the way, as Marvel has said the entire cast has yet to be revealed. However, we do know a few people who will not make the trip. Elizabeth Olsen, who played Scarlet Witch in several MCU movies and a TV show, recently revealed that she will not return for Marvel’s next big crossover. Now, we know an X-Men actor who will not return as well.

Halle Berry played Storm in four different X-Men films. She was fantastic in those movies and returned for the fourth despite them notoriously doing her dirty. For those unfamiliar, director Matthew Vaughn revealed a more Storm-focused script was sent to Berry to get her interested in the third film, with FOX intending to jettison it once she signed on. That sucks and even if it was a fake script, I bet it was better than what we got. We don’t know if Disney tried to pull a similar trick on Berry, but we do know we won’t be seeing her in Avengers: Doomsday.

The B.A.P.S. actress was recently asked why we didn’t see her name drawn for the list of returning X-Men. Her advice to anyone waiting for her to be among the surprise entrants in the film? “Keep waiting. It’s not going to be there,” she explained to Black Girl Nerds while at CinemaCon. “It’s not going to be there.” As we’ve seen with Berry before, this doesn’t close the door but her addition does not seem likely. Speculation is running wild as we know few details about the film, but I don’t think anyone expects any older X-Men to stick around past Doomsday (and maybe Secret Wars). Maybe Halle Berry wasn’t interested in a swan song. We may never know (unless one of the Russos breaks rank in a few years and explains how they sent her a script where she fought Doctor Doom singlehandedly and Berry didn’t buy it).