Patrick Stewart got the call. Ian McKellen got the call. James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, Rebecca Romijn. All of them are coming back for Avengers: Doomsday. Famke Janssen did not get the call.
At SpaceCon, Janssen addressed it directly. "I think they made a mistake, but hey, who am I." She said it with a shrug, the way someone does when they already know the answer to their own question. She is Famke Janssen. She is Jean Grey. And the fact that Marvel apparently forgot that is genuinely baffling.
Let me be clear about something. The studio botched the Phoenix arc twice. The Last Stand turned one of the most powerful stories in comics history into a third act subplot. Dark Phoenix tried to course correct and somehow made it worse, burying the saga under reshoots and a release date that screamed "we have given up." But neither of those failures had anything to do with Janssen. She was the best thing in both attempts. Every scene where Jean struggled with her power, where something ancient and terrifying flickered behind her eyes, that was Janssen doing the work.
Jean Grey is not a supporting character. She is the fulcrum of the X-Men. She is the emotional center of the team, the person whose arc defines whether the story around her rises or collapses. You cannot build a meaningful X-Men presence in the MCU without her. And if you are going to bring back the original cast for a victory lap in Doomsday, leaving out the one character whose story was never properly told feels like a choice made by people who were not paying attention.
I get the logistics. Doomsday already has a massive cast, and fitting everyone in is a puzzle. But Stewart and McKellen are there. Marsden is there. You have the infrastructure of that original team already in place. Adding Janssen is not a stretch. It is a correction.
The frustrating part is that Janssen clearly wants to do it. She is not retired. She is not difficult. She is an actress who loves this character and played her with more depth than the scripts usually deserved. The door is right there.
Maybe the Russos fix this before cameras wrap. Maybe someone at Marvel reads the room and realizes that a Doomsday without Jean Grey is a Doomsday that left something important on the table. I would not hold my breath, but I would not count it out either. Stranger things have happened in this franchise.
For now, Janssen said her piece. And she was right.
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