Fox wasn’t kidding when they announced their plans to ramp up production on the various “X-Men” films.
Right now, Bryan Singer is hard at work finishing “X-Men: Days Of Future Past,” and even so, he took a moment to Tweet this morning that we can also look forward to “X-Men: Apocalypse” in 2016.
Several sites are reporting a May 27, 2016 date for the film, although that wasn’t part of Singer’s Tweet. If that’s true, then I’m curious what it means for James Mangold’s “Wolverine” sequel. Would they try to get that done between the two “X-Men” movies, or will they now try to get Jeff Wadlow’s “X-Force” up and running for 2015 instead and give Mangold time to aim for a 2017 release?
Apocalypse is a very powerful adversary for the X-Men, and if you want to talk about a role that gives an actor room to play something so over the top that they’ll forget where the top is, Apocalypse is perfect for that. Thousands of years old, Apocalypse is so strong that he has actually been able to restrain the Hulk when the Hulk was angry. He has preposterous stamina, he’s practically invulnerable, he can fly, he can teleport, he can alter his molecular structure to look like anything or anyone and he can mimic anyone else’s super-powers as well. He can use energy to heal himself, to shoot psychic blasts, and to generate force fields. Oh… and he’s basically immortal, possessing blood so complex that one drop of it can rewrite the genetic code of any other blood it comes into contact with. So… yeah. He’s sort of a big deal.
I’ll say this much for Fox… they appear to have gotten over some of their earlier hang-ups about the “X-Men” universe, and they’re steering directly into some of the crazier areas of storytelling potential. I have no idea which Apocalypse story they’re going to tell or how this relates to whatever happens at the end of “Days Of Future Past,” but it’s safe to say everything’s coming up mutant for the next few years at 20th Century Fox.
We’ll have more on this one as details become available.