James Marsden’s Cyclops has apparently taken the Avengers’ 'death is temporary' policy a little too seriously. In 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, Cyclops was vaporized by Jean Grey at Alkali Lake after their reunion spiraled into a Phoenix-powered catastrophe, leaving behind nothing but his glasses. Yet Avengers: Doomsday appears to have found him very much alive, still firing those signature red-hot optic blasts like his explosive exit never happened.

And now, with Cyclops back in action, fans are left asking the obvious question: how is James Marsden's Cyclo still alive?

The short answer is that James Marsden’s Cyclops is alive because Wolverine rewrote the timeline before Jean Grey could vaporize him. In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine travels back to 1973 and changes history, erasing the future where Cyclops dies in X-Men: The Last Stand. The post-reset timeline even shows Scott Summers alive at Xavier’s School.

The slightly bigger answer is that Avengers: Doomsday is not bringing a dead Earth-616 native back from the grave. James Marsden’s Cyclops belongs to the Fox X-Men universe, which exists separately from the MCU’s Earth-616. However, the Multiverse Saga has made that distinction increasingly flimsy, especially after Monica Rambeau crossed into the original X-Men universe in The Marvels’ post-credits scene.

So, the Cyclops now appearing in Avengers: Doomsday is best understood as the timeline-reset version of Scott Summers crossing into the MCU through the multiverse. He survived because Wolverine changed history, and he can now appear because the multiverse has apparently decided that continuity is more of a suggestion. After all, Marvel Studios already has the dimensional doors open.

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While Avengers: Doomsday will have to reveal exactly how James Marsden’s Cyclops enters the MCU and what the Spider-Man-teased Doomsday plot twist means, fans do not need to wait for the multiverse to explain why the character was killed so abruptly in the first place.

The reason Cyclops was killed off so abruptly had little to do with the character and everything to do with Hollywood scheduling. Bryan Singer left X-Men 3 to direct Superman Returns, taking James Marsden with him to play Richard White. With Marsden’s availability limited, 20th Century Fox chose to write Cyclops out within the first 20 minutes of X-Men: The Last Stand.

It was an extraordinarily permanent solution to a temporary scheduling problem, especially for one of the X-Men franchise’s most important characters. Years later, X-Men: Days of Future Past effectively erased that decision by rewriting the timeline, while Avengers: Doomsday now brings James Marsden’s Cyclops back into the spotlight. In other words, the multiverse may be complicated, but Cyclops is alive because Hollywood once had a calendar problem.

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Why do you think James Marsden's Cyclops is alive in Avengers: Doomsday? Let us know in the comments!