Aside from being co-creator of many of Marvel Comics’ most iconic heroes and villains, comic book legend Stan Lee also has another prestigious title: the king of cameos. In most Marvel movies, you can usually catch him on screen for a brief moment, sometimes even getting to deliver a humorous line. While his decades-long list of cameos is diverse, from the TV movie The Trial of the Incredible Hulk to May’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Lee just revealed he’s really psyched about what he’ll be doing next year in X-Men: Apocalypse.
When asked by a fan what his favorite cameo has been so far last Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con (via Business Insider), Lee admitted that while he loves them all, he particularly liked the one he did "for the next X-Men movie." This led to the panel’s moderator whispering something, presumably about how he’s not supposed to talk about that. This prompted Lee to reply, "When you say I'm not allowed—will I be arrested?" After the audience finished cheering, Lee continued:
When you go see the next X-Men movie when it comes out, and see my fantastic cameo, you will say, 'I remember he told me about it here. It's a different cameo in that it has one additional thing in it.
That’s not a lot of information to go on, but it sounds we can expect Stan Lee to be doing something especially unusual for the 2016 blockbuster. Personally, I’m hoping that we get to see him display some kind of mutant ability. Thanks to the timeline being altered in X-Men: Days of Future Past, the public knows about the existence of mutants earlier. Maybe we’ll get to see him show off a cool power out in public. If he’s not a mutant, then maybe he’ll have a direct connection to the story. Maybe he’s the guy that hired those people to break into Apocalypse’s tomb, thus awakening the planet’s most powerful mutant and inadvertently dooming us all… but that’s just me spitballing.
Although Stan Lee’s has appeared in nearly every Marvel Cinematic Universe project, his presence in the X-Men films has been surprisingly light. Lee created the X-Men in 1963 with the legendary artist Jack Kirby, but his only appearances in the franchise have been as a hot dog vendor in X-Men and a guy gardening his lawn in X-Men: The Last Stand. Lee will also be appearing in Captain America: Civil War and Deadpool in 2016, so you’ll get to see him more than once at the theater next year.
You can catch Lee’s X-Men: Apocalypse cameo when the film hits theaters on May 27, 2016.
