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I know we all assumed Bryan Singer would be back to direct X-Men: Apocalypse. After all, he's been writing the movie over the last few months with his team that consists of Simon Kinberg, Michael Dougherty, and Dan Harris. Until today, though, there was no official confirmation that he would direct the movie, especially with the controversy surrounding the filmmaker. Variety reports that 20th Century Fox has closed the deal with the director, and now he can really get moving on it.
Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and James McAvoy are a few of several cast members that are expected to return to the franchise. Kinberg talked about some of the characters they might use in the film in an interview with Yahoo! saying:
The X-Men film that we’re working on now as everybody knows is X-Men: Apocalypse and that really follows the stories of the let’s say ‘First Class’ X-Men. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, many others of that generation of X-Men. So, in future X-Men films? Perhaps, but in ‘Apocalypse’ it will really be the continuation of the ‘past’ of ‘Days of Future Past.’
He goes on to say that if they do include younger versions of certain character, that they will be recast:
"If we included some of the original X-Men, like Storm, Jean, Scott, and others, yeah we would have to recast them, because Apocalypse takes place a good twenty years before 'X1,' which now insanely was fifteen years ago. It would be very hard to do. Halle, Famke, and Jimmy, and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those characters to life and they’re so identified, those actors, with the parts now. So it would be a tall task, but I also would have said before 'First Class' there would be no way we could find actors who could stand alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and I think we managed to with Michael and James finding their own interpretation of the characters, not doing an impersonation. So, are we going to have to recast? If some of those characters were in the movie we would, but we’ll see."
Singer also said in a previous interview that the movie would have the most mass destruction in any X-Men movie to date.
"We're going to deal the the [sic] notion of ancient mutants - the fact they were born and existed thousands of years ago. But it'll be a contemporary movie - well, it'll take place in the '80s... The '80s is a period now - it's hard for me to believe that! Apocalypse will have more of the mass destruction that X-Men films, to date, have not relied upon. There’s definitely now a character and a story that allow room for that kind of spectacle."
He also said that the 1980s set film could feature younger versions of some of the other older characters that we've seen in previous movies. I'm glad that Singer is directing, I loved what he did with Days of Future Past, and it seems like he's on a creative roll with the franchise.
Fox will release X-Men: Apocalypse on May 27th, 2016.
