It's been a long time coming, but things are finally starting to move forward on Marvel Studios' elusive X-Men reboot.
Michael Lesslie is working on the script (we expect another writer to join him at some point), and Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier recently confirmed that he will helm the project.
"I can’t say anything about it, but we’ve started work on X-Men, and that’s obviously very, very exciting," Schreier revealed during a recent interview with Empire. "There are so many things that I didn’t know about before I started [Thunderbolts*]. The biggest learning curve for me was the proportion of the action to the more emotional, character-driven scenes, and how, even though it’s more shooting days than I’ve ever had, they get eaten up quite quickly by the action stuff. By the time we got to the end of it, it felt like, 'Oh, now I feel like we get how to do this a little bit better.'"
Casting is believed to be underway (numerous actors have been rumored to be on the studio's radar), and we may now know when Marvel is planning to introduce the world to this new live-action take on the mutant heroes.
Disney is currently holding three 2028 release dates for unknown Marvel movies — February 18, May 5, and November 10 - and Jeff Sneider is confident that X-Men will hit theaters on May 5, 2028.
"That’ll be the 20th anniversary of the MCU, which launched in May 2008 with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man," he notes in his latest newsletter. "If Avengers: Secret Wars (due in December 2027) is meant to mark the end of this chapter of the MCU, the X-Men movie is supposed to represent a new beginning, and Disney has high hopes for the superhero film, which will introduce the next generation of mutants."
This would certainly make sense, but we'll obviously have to consider this a rumor pending an official announcement from the studio.
We know that quite a few actors from 20th Century Fox's X-Men franchise will reprise their roles for Avengers: Doomsday, but there is a chance that these next Avengers movies will also introduce at least a couple of new mutant characters that will factor into the reboot.
Whether these particular villains will appear in the first X-Men movie remains to be seen, but a recent rumor from Daniel Richtman claimed that Marvel has big plans for both Mr. Sinister and Apocalypse in the next MCU saga. The scooper also believes that the studio "has some names in mind," but the roles have not been cast yet.