20th Century Fox owns the rights to the X-Men franchise, and they are not about to let those mutants go. With Marvel Studios announcing plans into the next decade, and Sony pushing their Spider-Man series with all their marketing arsenal, Fox is not going to be outdone. With more than a month left to go before the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past, both the studio and Bryan Singer are pushing hard for the next installment in this lucrative franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse.
In a recent interview with EW, Singer revealed some details about the new X-Men instalment, saying that the film will be “somewhat” based on the comic book arc from the 90s, entitled Age of Apocalypse.
You won’t feel at the end of the movie that it set up Apocalypse. What it does is it sets up possibilities. But what we’ll discover in Apocalypse is that events in this movie made that happen… Apocalypse deals with ancient mutancy. What would humans have thought mutants were? What would mutants think humans were? You’re dealing with gods and things like that. And what if one survived and what if that found its way into our world?
So, X-Men: Apocalypse will be a kind-of sequel. Producer/writer Simon Kinberg further elaborated that the film will be something like a disaster movie, as the title would imply. Basically, it’s going to a be a not-quite sequel that may or may not be set in an alternative universe with disaster movie implications and maybe some religion thrown in for good measure. That sounds…interesting?
X-Men: Apocalypse will have some continuity with its predecessors, for actors James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence are set to return once more. Singer also promises the arrival of fan favorites Nightcrawler and Gambit, so we have those guys to look forward to as well.
Of course, Fox has not been doing quite as well with their X-Men franchise films as they would probably like. The Wolverine received decidedly mixed reviews and reactions, but made enough to justify carrying on in that vein. Days of Future Past will of course be a deciding factor in the continuation of the franchise – if it does well at the box office, we can expect more X-Men films until the world begs for mercy, or at least stops going to see them.
X-Men: Days of Future Past will premiere on May 23rd, while X-Men: Apocalypse will arrive in May 2016.