X-Plosion

Writer-producer Simon Kinberg on the next mutant movies…

While X-Men: Apocalypse marked the end of the second X-Men movie trilogy, writerproducer Simon Kinberg says the possibilities remain endless for Marvel’s mutants on screen.

“If you know the X-Men comic books,” Kinberg tells Red Alert at this year’s Saturn Awards, “you know that there’s hundreds, even thousands of other good storylines, some big storylines we haven’t told yet, or storylines like Dark Phoenix that maybe we’d want to tell a different way. We’re deep in the trenches of that now, but we have a sense of a few different areas we could explore.”

Kinberg adds that the X-Men films will continue to jump forward in time, though perhaps not as much as one decade per instalment. With a “very loyal to the comics” New Mutants movie in development under director Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars), production on the spin-off Legion TV show underway (it airs in 2017), and Gambit set to start shooting by spring 2017, Kinberg is also overseeing Deadpool 2. The sequel to this year’s fourth wall-busting blockbuster, he explains, has a secret weapon that will help it succeed where so many comedy sequels have failed in the past...

“There’s no shortage of material that comes out of Ryan Reynolds’s brain and out of his mouth,” Kinberg says. “Reynolds was just born to play Deadpool. So we have the advantage of this guy who can just go forever coming up with fun new material.”