It doesn't get more official in 2013 than a tweet from director Bryan Singer that Halle Berry will reprise her role of Storm once again in his new X-Men film, Days of Future Past. Berry played the iconic weather-controlling mutant in three previous films including Singer's 2000 film X-Men and its first sequel, X2. The Academy Award-winning actress will reunite with fellow X-Men actors Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin and Shawn Ashmore in the new film, which will also star X-Men: First Class' James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, making for what might be the most auspicious cast of any superhero movie.



First published in 1981, "Days of Future Past" was a two-issue storyline by Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin that imagined a grim dystopian future where mutants' greatest fears were realized as a consequence of the X-Men failing to stop Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn and Jennifer Lawrence in previous X-films) and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from assassinating a U.S. senator. Mutants were criminalized and housed in government internment camps, and mutant-hunting Sentinel robots were an ever-present threat. The Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) of the future sends her psyche back in time and into the body her younger self so that she can help her teammates avoid this terrible fate, and the story jumps back and forth between the two time periods as the action plays out. Storm, along with Wolverine, Colossus and, of course, Kitty, is one of the X-Men to appear in both the present and the future timelines in the original story. Sadly, Storm gets skewered by a javelin fired out of a Sentinel's finger.

Despite its brief two-issue length, "Days of Future Past" has been tremendously influential and continues to be an inexorably definitive piece of Marvel's mutant mythology.