Duality and split personas have been part of superhero cinema for years but usually it’s one actor playing two parts (Superman and Clark Kent, Batman and Bruce Wayne, etc.) not two actors sharing one name in the credits.

That comes across in these intriguing new promotional posters for the 2014 film X-Men: Days of Future Past and it came across this weekend in San Diego at Comic-Con International panel featuring four actors who inhabit two mutants; Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy as a melded Professor X and Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender as a polarized versions of Magneto.

NEXT: Xavier x 2

The Bryan Singer movie is based on a classic two-issue comics tale that introduces a bleak future where powerful machines subjugate and butcher the warm-blooded populace,, which leads to a desperate time-travel gamble Yes that all sounds like a rip-off of The Terminator — but X-Men comics writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne was published by Marvel Comics in 1981, three years before James Cameron fired-up the Skynet artificial intelligence.

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In San Diego, Jackman saved a stage moment to honor Len Wein, the writer of the first Wolverine story, and Mangold spoke with admiration and detail about the 1982 epic by Frank Miller and Claremont that is the core source material for the new film.

One of the big revelations during the footage shown during the panel was the fact that Wolverine (and not Kitty Pryde) appears to be the time traveler sent back through to change history That’s no surprise considering that fact that Jackman is the heart at the center of the Fox universe of beset mutants. Days of Future Past will be the seventh feature film with Wolverine if you count his cameo in X-Men: First Class. And (shockingly) that will create a tie between the clawed anti-hero with the first and most famous superhero of them all.