X-Men: First Class had some rather fortuitous casting in Jennifer Lawrence. Cast off her role in Winter’s Bone, Lawrence has quickly moved to the center of the franchise: X-Men: Days of Future Past practically had Wolverine hand her the torch of “unofficial lead character,” and X-Men: Apocalypse more or less has her as the lead character. And now Bryan Singer has said it’s time Mystique got her own spin-off.
Singer commented on the Empire podcast that Mystique is ideally set up for a standalone movie, although he also noted that they might have to recast, because Lawrence doesn’t seem keen to return. That said, it seems unlikely a Mystique movie would happen without Lawrence, although she’s plenty busy with playing off Chris Pratt in Passengers and working on Darren Aronofsky’s next movie.
Singer had an intriguing point, though, which is that Mystique deals with anti-mutant sentiment on the ground, which is something we’ve never really seen in the movies. They tend to focus either on Xavier’s Utopian dream of humans and mutants living together, or on government reaction to mutants. Mystique rumbling in the streets with anti-mutant hate groups, or using her powers for espionage, would make for an interesting change of pace.
It’s just an idea, at the moment, as the X-Men have a pretty crowded schedule at Fox. Wolverine 3 is in production, Gambit will be shooting soon after several delays, Deadpool 2 is in the works, another X-Men movie may be coming, and that’s not even getting into X-Force or New Mutants. So there will be plenty of X-Men movies, but we suspect there might be more room for Mystique that it seems at the moment.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
