With no other planned X-Men movies following “X-Men: Apocalypse,” you might think that 20th Century Fox might be panicking, but the studio has options. Lots of them. “The Wolverine 3” drops next year, the sequel to “Deadpool” shoots this fall, and beyond that they’ve got more than a few irons in the fire. And if you thought Fox was going to let Wolverine die with Hugh Jackman‘s final performance as the character, you’d mistaken. In fact, thoughts are already turning to reviving the mutant in female form.
“I have discussed that with the studio. I actually initially pitched the X-Force and the female [Wolverine],” he told Fandango.
So, what’s the deal with the female Wolverine? Well, she’s also known as X-23 aka Laura Kinney, and she’s a clone of Logan, and more importantly, a member of X-Force. And with a lot of chatter surrounding a potential movie for that team, it makes a lot of sense for Singer/Fox to purse that potential. And in fact, Singer reveals that Simon Kinberg is already working on the early stages of the script — and yes, it will be grown for grown-ups.
“…if we were to make an X-Force movie, that probably should be R-rated,” he told Den Of Geek. “And what we’re doing with the ‘Wolverine’ movie… that wasn’t impacted by ‘Deadpool.’ We’d made the decision for ‘Wolverine’ to be R-rated before ‘Deadpool came out. But I think there’s even more confidence about having made that decision now that you see that an R-rated ‘Deadpool’ movie can do better than any X-Men movie’s ever done.”
I’m not quite sure I buy Kinberg’s claim that Wolverine was going to be R-rated all along, but considering Deadpool is part of X-Force, it makes sense the movie would go R-rated. But wait, what about “Gambit“? At one point, it was all raring to go with Channing Tatum slated to star, but then director Rupert Wyatt dropped out, it kept getting pushed back, until it was off the calendar entirely. Well, Kinberg says it’s still in the works.
“We’ve got to get the script right,” he told Flickering Myth. “We just didn’t get the script to the place where we all thought the movie deserved. So we’re still working on the script. We’re very close, actually, to being done with the script. And the hope is that…we would shoot at the end of this year, or the beginning of next year.”
“I’m not going to say anything about it content-wise. I think one of the things that I’ve learnt on all these movies – and maybe the lesson was best learned for me on ‘Deadpool’ – is the most important thing is getting the tone and the voice right. That the storytelling, the actual narrative, the plots are sort of interchangeable and disposable, ultimately,” he continued. “If I ask you what your favourite movies are, you’re not going to tell me about the plot. You’re going to tell me you love this character. And so what we’ve really tried to do with ‘Gambit’ is make sure that we get the voice of that character right and the tone of the comics 100% on the page.”
I get the point Kinberg is trying to make, but the whole plot-doesn’t-matter thing is still fairly irksome. He might want to look back on “Fantastic Four” and discover what happens when you have a forgettable plot combined with characters you don’t want to root for….
Anyway, let us know what you think about Fox’s future superhero plans in the comments section below.