Updated July 14, 2020 58.8k votes 4.1k voters 1.4m views
Voting Rules
Vote up the actors you wish had gotten the Marvel role.
Casting is truly an art form. What would Tony Stark be without Robert Downey, Jr., who had to fight to be cast? And what would Marvel be without Iron Man's raging success?
Joss Whedon's favorite character, Kitty Pryde, was almost played by one of his alumna: “So the girl I turned into sort of a superhero in my movie was going to read for the character that most influenced ALL my girl-heroes, Kitty Pryde. Karmically funky. Anyhoo, she called me after and said it was very emotional and kind of like when she read for 'Firefly,' she just got into a very intense groove. She started telling me about the scene she read and that’s when I realized why it was kind of like she read for 'Firefly.'”
It turns out they had adapted Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men #5 for the sides.
This was something else entirely. Before we saw January Jones zombie-walk through the role of Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class, they had something else in mind. Alice Eve had actually been cast and had even been on set. It was rumored she had even filmed some scenes, when dozens of rewrites came through, and she felt the part was no longer worthwhile, as the character was basically being relegated to a scantily clad sidekick. So, Alice Eve walked away and January Jones... happened.
Before she was Catwoman, she was cast as Black Cat in the fourth installment of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man franchise. It's funny that she went from one comic publisher's take on a cat-burgling villain to the another's. When Spider-Man 4 fell apart, so did this role.
Ironically, the role later went to his sometime wrestling partner, Tyler Mane. Bryan Singer originally wanted Kevin Nash for Sabretooth. His schedule eventually prevented him from taking the role, and he later went on to play Jigsaw in The Punisher.
How different the X-Men films would have been with Rachel Leigh Cook as Rogue instead of "True Blood's" Anna Paquin. She was outright offered the role when a slew of young stars were vying for it, including Sarah Michelle Gellar and Katherine Isabelle, but ended up turning it down, thinking there would be too much CGI involved.
Spider-Man 4 would have featured John Malkovich as the winged burglar, but after the critical failure of Spider-Man 3 and tensions between the studio and director Sam Raimi, Sony decided to reboot the franchise.
