Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen won't return for X-Men: Apocalypse

Despite the cast of last year's X-Men: Days Of Future Past powering that film toward a mammoth box office haul of $748m (making it the eighth highest-grossing movie of 2014), it looks like sequel X-Men: Apocalypse is going to feature something of a shake-up.

While chatting with Larry King (in an interview that will air this Wednesday), Patrick Stewart confirmed that he and Ian McKellen won't be returning as Professor X and Magneto for the sixth X-Men movie.

“I was learning quite a lot more about it last night,” Stewart said of the movie, “and it is going to be looking very much at the earlier lives of all our characters. And so I don’t think we’ll be making an appearance.”

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Which is a shame, considering it had already been seven years since we last saw Stewart and McKellen playing those roles (in X-Men: The Last Stand) when they pitched up in X-Men: DOFP.

With X-Men: Apocalypse set to close out the trilogy of prequel films that started with X-Men: First Class, though, could it be that 20th Century Fox have other plans for the 'older' incarnations of its comic-book heroes?

Here's hoping we get to see them dealing with the fall-out of X-Men: DOFP's time re-flow at some point in the not-too-distant future.