See Halle Berry Replaced As X-Men’s Storm By Keke Palmer
We use AI to reimagine Storm as played by Keke Palmer of Nope fame.
As comic book movies keep getting remade, audiences get used to seeing different actors play their favorite characters, such as Andrew Garfield replacing Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Even though we’re going to see Hugh Jackman return as Wolverine in the upcoming Deadpool 3, it’s a safe bet all of the other X-Men are going to get recast before they are introduced to the MCU. With that in mind, we decided to see what it would be like if Halle Berry was replaced as Storm by Keke Palmer.
In the original X-Men movies, Halle Berry’s Storm was one of the most memorable characters. Unfortunately, what she is remembered for best is the infamous line delivery she gave while fighting Toad in the first movie. After asking him if he knew what happened to a toad that got struck by lightning, Berry says, “the same thing that happens to everything else.”
On paper, the dramatic line delivery might make sense because Storm is a literal weather goddess, but the line went over like a lead balloon in theaters. It turns out this particular line was written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, and he had intended the punchline to be delivered as a kind of casual throwaway line, but he claims that Halle Berry chose to give it the overdramatic delivery. This may have been due to the fact that Berry wasn’t accustomed to genre films at the time, but that’s certainly not the case with Keke Palmer.
Keke Palmer has starred in many high-profile projects, but unlike Halle Berry, she is carving out a special niche in genre films and TV shows (especially horror). This includes starring roles in the Scream TV series, Scream Queens, and most recently, the breathtaking Jordan Peele film Nope. That was a movie where we saw Palmer deal with the kind of weird, oversized threat the X-Men would normally fight, so we’re pretty confident that she would fit right in on the team.
Another reason we’d love to see Keke Palmer as Storm is that, with respect to Halle Berry, the character has never really been done justice on the big screen. Berry got better over the course of that original trilogy, but her character often took a backseat in favor of giving more scenes and plotlines to fan-favorite character Wolverine. Alexandra Shipp did a good job playing a younger Storm in X-Men: Apocalypse, but that messy film (which woefully misused Oscar Isaac as the title villain) didn’t give her character much to do.
Ultimately, as much as we’d love to see Keke Palmer replace Halle Berry as Storm, we have no way of knowing who is going to play this famous mutant when the X-Men are introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Palmer may be too busy at the moment: following the success of Nope, she has five different major projects coming up, including acting alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 3: Kicking the Habit. However, if Palmer could appear as Storm in an X-Men movie preferably directed by Jordan Peele, we’d be first in line for tickets.
