After the smashing success of Logan at the box office this past weekend and the fantastic promo for Deadpool 2 that debuted alongside it, all eyes are back on 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise. After the middling Apocalypse, fans found themselves feeling tired of the mutants, losing the excitement they had after efforts like First Class and Days of Future Past. Thankfully, things seem to be back on track now and as we look ahead to the future, there’s a lot coming down the pipeline that we can start looking forward to.
Fox currently has several projects in development that are set in the X-Men universe, one of which is X-Force, which will be written and directed by Joe Carnahan. We haven’t heard too many concrete details on it just yet, but while chatting to Deadline earlier this week, producer Simon Kinberg confirmed a few things that most of us already expected. For one, he noted that it will indeed have an R-rating (no surprise there) and that it will mostly revolve around Deadpool and Cable (again, that’s not terribly surprising).
What’s perhaps more interesting is that Kinberg said that X-Force will be separate from the X-Men movies. Here’s his quote in full:
“We are working hard on New Mutants, Gambit with Channing Tatum, Deadpool 2 and the new X-Force movie where Deadpool is alongside Cable and other main characters. Deadpool 2 is going into production this year. Then X-Force which is a combination of Deadpool, and Cable –they’re like the Black ops of the X-Men. They’re much darker and have an R-rated decibel. There are other X-Men characters coming into X-Force at different times in the comic, but it’s separate from X-Men.”
There is a larger architecture to tell these stories in. I talk to the studio all the time about this and there is a plan for how these movies can connect and be a part of a larger narrative. It’s something that’s fun, exciting and it will be interesting to see how we marry the different tones that we’ve been generating in these standalone movies of the X-Men universe. But we go into making the best movie we can. It’s not just about a Colossus or Deadpool cameo. Connecting all of these movies will happen when it organically makes sense. These movies aren’t simply being built as stepping stones to a larger story. Each one is wholly enclosed and a movie worth seeing.”
Unlike Marvel, who really have no barriers in between their standalone films anymore, it seems like 20th Century Fox is going for a bit of a different approach here, setting their efforts in the same universe but not allowing for complete crossover. That much was clear with both Deadpool and Logan and it seems that that’s the road they’ll continue to head down. And honestly, that sounds just fine.
A lot of people are getting sick of the Marvel formula and the superhero genre could definitely use a bit of a shake up right about now. Both Deadpool and James Mangold’s recent threequel proved to be wildly refreshing and if future efforts follow a similar path, Fox’s X-Men franchise could quickly become one of the most exciting ones around. We’ll have to wait until Deadpool 2 lands in theaters to learn more about which direction the studio is headed in and how X-Force is going to connect to everything, but at the moment, things are certainly looking very bright for these characters.
