If there’s one title Marvel Studios has to stick the landing on, it’s the live-action X-Men.
Indeed, with the Fox universe having sputtered out, Beau DeMayo proving that the mutants are more than capable of flying high, and the X-Men being some of the most thematically complex protagonists in all of Marveldom, the X-Men film is going to need to be worth its weight in gold. And, to make that happen, a crack team of the finest creatives is a must.
It stands to reason, then, that Marvel Studios would get the ball rolling in the best possible fashion by hiring an out-and-out maverick of a screenwriter; one who’s demonstrated a razor-sharp wit, but not too sharp as to cut through the essence of this superpowered ensemble too egregiously. One with a crack track record that would make even the most volatile scrutinizer breathe pretty easy, and one that, above all, is one whose name we could all take a glance at and think “Yeah, that makes sense.”
Anyway, Michael Lesslie is officially penning the script to the MCU’s live-action X-Men film, per Deadline, so you can disregard all of what I just said, and read on as we attempt to pick our jaws up off the floor and try to make even a bit of sense out of this announcement.
Who is Michael Lesslie? The MCU’s live-action X-Men film scribe, explained
Now, you should never judge a book by its cover, and for all we know, Lesslie is already cooking up some great ideas as we speak. That being said, it’s foolish to think that Marvel was going to be able to hire Lesslie for a film as important as X-Men without some fan skepticism.
Let’s look at Lesslie’s track record; his writing on the short film Heavy Metal Drummer earned him a BAFTA nomination, and he’s had two plays—a Swimming with Sharks adaptation and a Hamlet sequel called Prince of Denmark—wind up in the West End. So far, so good.
Enter 2015, the release year of Justin Kurzel’s film Macbeth, of which Lesslie (in his feature film writing debut) is among the three screenwriters involved in the adaptation. It was pretty good, and just as well; screen adaptations of Macbeth, after all, are probably among the most abundant resources in the universe at this point, so they’d sure as hell better be good by now.
It’s after that where, for better or worse, things get interesting. Lesslie was again part of a screenwriting trio in 2016, this time for a film adaptation of a video game franchise you may have heard of called Assassin’s Creed, and let’s just say that there would be a certain wisdom in keeping that film off your résumé. However, there are three screenwriters involved in that film, so it’s hard to trace any fault directly back to Lesslie.
We have a similar situation in The Little Drummer Girl, where Lesslie served as lead writer and penned four of the six episodes of the critically acclaimed spy thriller series. The only problem? By most all accounts, everyone liked it in spite of the plot rather than because of the plot. Maybe his co-writer Claire Wilson missed a memo or two…?
And finally we arrive at The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, easily Lesslie’s most prolific credit in the Hollywood sphere, and the best benchmark for whether or not he’ll do a good job on X-Men.
Songbirds & Snakes is a pretty fantastic movie; unwieldy and occasionally self-indulgent as it is, it’s still a solid portrait piece of a man whose story exemplifies a system that makes men torture who they perceive as their enemies. To that end, the subject matter of X-Men isn’t a far cry from the blockbuster territory that Lesslie is already familiar with.
However, while Songbirds & Snakes could easily be pegged as Lesslie’s strongest feature screenwriting credit, he also shared the screenplay with one Michael Arndt, who has an Academy Award for writing Little Miss Sunshine, and an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Toy Story 3, both of which he penned by himself. And, of course, he also co-wrote Catching Fire.
In other words, Lesslie’s best and most important screenwriting credit also happens to be co-written by the guy with previous Hunger Games experience who also wrote the awards juggernaut Little Miss Sunshine. And with Macbeth being a moot story at this point and the rest of his credits doing no favors to his reputation (with respect to the fact that there were multiple people involved in those projects as well), there’s a real chance that Lesslie was a weak link, and fans absolutely have the right to harbor a few doubts about how one of Marvel’s most important films will ultimately shake out.
But again, anyone worth speaking to will hope to hope itself that Lesslie knocks it out of the park here, and I can only hope that he just rolled some bad luck in the jump to feature film and television writing, and that Songbirds & Snakes‘ many flashes of brilliance came from Lesslie; if so, X-Men is in a great pair of hands.
