Try to keep up here, people. On Sunday, the Journal de Montreal reported that Fox is planning to start filming a X-Men: Apocalypse sequel in Montreal in November 2016 in advance of a 2018 release date. Not only that, but Bryan Singer was returning to direct. The internet was all like, “What? No way! Isn’t Singer going to be busy with his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake? Plus, hasn’t all the talk about Apocalypse been that it will bring an end to the Singer era of the cinematic X-Men?” But then the internet hive mind figured, “Well, Fox does have that X-Men movie scheduled to come out in 2018, but they’ve never actually said what it was going to be. An Apocalypse sequel makes sense. The end of 2016 is around when they’d probably have to start filming for that, and they have been filming these things up in Canada lately to save money. Maybe this is true.”
Well, it’s not. According to Collider, “We have confirmed with a very trusted source that this recent report is absolutely false. No plans have been made to start filming the X-Men: Apocalypse sequel in Montreal in 2017, and Singer has not signed on to direct. The team is still very deep into post-production on Apocalypse, so while there’s likely been talk internally about where the story for the next X-Men film could go, plans are far from being firmed up.”
That settles that. For now. Apocalypse was quietly announced on Twitter by Bryan Singer before Days of Future Past came out, with no advanced warning. Maybe something like that will happen here, although thanks to Journal de Montreal‘s rumor we’ve been given a heads-up. Or maybe Apocalypse truly will be the end of the Singer era, and that 2018 X-Men movie will turn out to be Deadpool 2 or something. As always, we’ll just have to wait and see and remember that Deadpool comes out on February 12, 2016 and Apocalypse on May 27, 2016.
Simon Kinberg
Also, since I have you here about X-Men here’s what producer Simon Kingberg recently said about Legion, the upcoming X-Men TV show on FX:
“I mean the thing that’s cool and that’s the hope in branching out to TV is that we can tell these X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone. It’s one of the thing we’re kind of doing in the different movie franchises. I mean Deadpool obviously has a very different, almost antithetical tone to the mainline X-Men movies. The X-Men movies are dramatic and almost operatic, whereas Deadpool is irreverent and hysterical and sort of a dirty R-rated comedy in many ways. And Gambit will have its own different flavor and tone to it, will be more of like a heist movie and a sexy thriller in a way. So the TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with [Fargo showrunner] Noah Hawley and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories.”
Easy there, tiger. Breaking Bad is a pretty lofty comparison. Also, um, the X-Men comic book mythology is impossibly dense. I don’t even know what Legion is! Collider, you want to take this one? “Legion is the story of David Charles Haller, the mutant son of Professor Charles Xavier and Gabrielle Haller. After being diagnosed as schizophrenic and entering into an endless series of mental hospitals, Haller meets a fellow patient who helps him to understand that maybe all the hallucinations and voices he’s been hearing aren’t products of his imagination after all.”
Oh. You’re going to use that premise to blow up the genre? Cool. Go nuts with that.