Though 20th Century Fox don’t have access to many Marvel characters outside of the merry band of mutants, there are certainly more than enough X-Men comic books and spinoff teams to keep the studio busy for years to come. Up until now, most of the movies have focused on Wolverine and his teammates, but with Hugh Jackman hanging up the claws after next month’s Logan, it looks like Fox is going to begin drafting in some of the more obscure characters that fall under the X-umbrella.
We know Josh Boone’s New Mutants is on the way, and that Gambit movie should eventually climb out of development hell, but what can we expect to see further down the line? Well, quite a bit, actually. During a new interview, writer/producer Simon Kinberg – who’s actually rumored to be taking the helm of the next main saga film – dropped a few hints about what might be on Fox’s agenda:
We have a sense of where each of all of the existing characters go from Deadpool to New Mutants to the mainland X-Men movies to potentially even X-23,” Kinberg said. “Then, there’s other characters, like X-Flight, like Exiles… There’s a lot of characters to mine going forward. We’re still sort of in this phase where now we’ve completed the Wolverine story with Logan and we begin hopefully with New Mutants and eventually Gambit and continue with Deadpool.
We assume by “X-Flight” Kinberg means Canadian super-team Alpha-Flight, which makes sense given their ties to Wolverine. The Exiles, on the other hand, are a relatively new bunch, consisting of characters such as Morph, Thunderbird, Mimic and Blink – who we recently found out would feature in FOX TV’s new X-Man family drama, as played by Jamie Chung.
Of course, just because Kinberg is throwing out the names of potential projects, that doesn’t mean there are concrete plans in place to take them into development. Still, it’s definitely nice to get some idea of where the X-Men franchise could go after the next few films and it certainly gives fans a lot to look forward to.