Following the Disney/Fox merger, the X-Men are back in the hands of Marvel Studios and a reboot is inevitable. That admittedly seems like a waste of the talented cast who have starred in movies like X-Men: First Class and Dark Phoenix, but the director of the latter, Simon Kinberg, has now expressed interest in having another go at bringing these mutants to the big screen.
Of course, after Dark Phoenix, that's likely to strike fear into the hearts of many X-Men fans!
"Sure. I mean, I love the X-Men," he said when IGN asked if he would be open to rebooting the heroes for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "They were my favorite comic growing up...for a lot of reasons, wanting to fit in growing up and being a bit of an outcast as a young teen, X-Men really spoke to me. It's something I've always loved."
"I've obviously dedicated a lot of my life, between X-Men movies and Logan and the Deadpool films. I've dedicated a whole lot of my life to it and could imagine doing it in a fresh new way," the filmmaker continued. "That would be exciting."
As for how he would choose to introduce the X-Men into the MCU, he adds: "One of the things the MCU does so well, and I have such a profound respect as a fellow filmmaker and then as just a fan, is that they're really loyal to the comics. They also are very unafraid of a more supernatural or science fiction tonality to their movies. They don't feel like they need to ground them so much in a sort of physics-based reality. I think there's something very great and liberating and spectacular about that."
"I think the X-Men could be very cool if you brought in science fiction elements and even the beyond Earth elements of the X-Men," Kinberg concludes. "That's something as a fan I would love to see, because I don't know that we've ever fully done that in a fully committed way in the Fox X-Men canon."
It's curious that Kinberg talks about adhering to the comics when he never really did as a writer, though he did attempt to take the X-Men into outer space with Dark Phoenix. Reshoots changed that cosmic ending, though, and the filmmaker has already talked about the challenges of turning his two-part film into a single movie.
Do you think he should be given another crack at the X-Men?