With the way Bryan Singer was very outgoing during the lead-up and production of X-Men: Days of Future Past, it’s no surprise that he’s pretty talkative about the next installment in the franchise with X-Men: Apocalypse. With a planned May 27th, 2016 release date and promoting the heck out of the feature that’s due out this spring which apparently has the most anticipated film status attached to it among fans polled, he’s talking up the next film a bit with where it stands.
“We’re currently breaking the story. We’re almost ready to go. Dan Harris, Michael Dougherty and Simon Kinberg are in the office across the street from me, working on story stuff right now. It’s great to have Dan and Michael back.”
We’ve known previously that the team from X2 and Days of Future Past were going to be involved so there are no surprises there. He does delve a bit into the time period for the next film, which does fit in with how the first two are progressing:
“We’re going to deal with the 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!”
We’ve gotten quite a lot of scale involved with Days of Future Past ahead of us with different time periods and a huge mixing of casts, but Singer promises that Apocalypse will be bigger:
“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… I don’t want to get too specific, but we’ll introduce familiar characters in a younger time. That’ll be fun to show the audience. I call these movies in-between-quels. It’s a mind-fuck sometimes in terms of where things fall in the timeline!”
This part is a bit harder to take seriously since he’s talking about when it comes to timelines as any real sense of continuity is already long out the window. That said, he’s got the potential to do a lot with the characters and seems to want to, but it’s hard to say how it will work out, depending on how much you like his recent work.
“Yeah, there actually are [more stories I want to tell]. It all stems back to when I did [the first] X-Men. You always want to know where a character’s going to go, what their future’s going be like. You can always sequelise. But on that film I also had actors asking ‘Who am I? Where did my character come from?’ So as a director you always need a backstory to give your actors. It may not be the right backstory, but it’s one you can give the actor to help them understand their character. These prequels are really exciting for me because they give me a chance to explore ideas I came up with more than a decade ago.”
[Source: Total Film]
I have to say I’m very curious to see if they can pull this off. This project is pretty ambitious. Sure will be a lot of CG.
I have no faith in Fox… ever. Give the mutants back to Marvel and just stop.
X-Men has been one series that hasn’t disappointed me.
Sure 3 didnt live up to expectation but the previous 2 happened to be very enjoyable and not too wild, Like Captain America or Thor which to me really did those characters a disservice.
The next X-Men looks fantastic especially since the last Wolverine was far better then the first spin-off. Going the same router as Avengers and making a spectacular might present some challenges but anything has to be better than the new Spiderman franchise…What an absolute catastrophe that has become.