Marvel’s mutant recruitment drive has reached the letter I. Deadline reports that Ben Wang, the young lead of Karate Kid: Legends and Disney+’s American Born Chinese, is in talks to play Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, in Marvel Studios’ X-Men. The trade says he saw off Gabriel LaBelle, Jackson Kelly and Rhenzy Feliz for the role. “In talks” isn’t a signed contract, so nobody should start carving his name into an ice sculpture just yet, but this is the usual last step before a Marvel announcement.
Jake Schreier, who directed Thunderbolts*, is making the film, from a script by Lee Sung Jin (creator of Beef) and Joanna Calo (The Bear). It’s due on 5 May 2028, which gives Bobby plenty of time to practise his ice slides. Wang joins a cast that, going by reports to date, includes Christopher Abbott as Professor X, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, Kit Connor as Cyclops, Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, Maya Boyd as Storm and Asa Germann as Angel. British readers will spot Heartstopper‘s Kit Connor in the visor, which is quite a career jump from rugby-team romance to firing optic blasts out of your face. Magneto remains uncast. Morgan Spector’s name is doing the rounds, but that’s still a rumour.
Iceman is one of the original five X-Men from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s first issue in 1963, which makes it slightly odd how little the films have ever given him to do. Shawn Ashmore played Bobby across four Fox films, from X-Men in 2000 to Days of Future Past in 2014, and spent most of that time chilling drinks, frosting a window or two and being upstaged by whichever mutant was sharing a scene with him. He only got to go full ice-form briefly, at the end of The Last Stand. The comics, meanwhile, have long established Bobby as an omega-level mutant who could probably freeze the Atlantic if he put his mind to it, and since 2015 they’ve also been telling the story of him coming out as gay. Plenty of fans will be hoping the new film finally treats him as more than a walking ice bucket.
Wang has been busy. He also turns up later this month as Wyatt Callow in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, and seems to be going straight from one franchise’s arena to another’s Danger Room. If the deal closes, Marvel will have most of its school register filled. All that’s left is a headmaster’s arch-enemy, and the small matter of persuading audiences that this time the X-Men will fare better than they did in the dog days of Fox.
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