Bryan Singer Has Signed On To Direct X-Men: Apocalypse; Simon Kinberg Teases Re-Casting

Fox’s inevitable follow-up to this year’s time-travel sci-fi smash, X-Men: Days Of Future Past, has landed a director. The not-entirely-unexpected Bryan Singer has signed on to reprise his helming duties for his fourth mutant outing, X-Men: Apocalypse.

While Singer’s name had been tossed around the rumour mill, today’s news from Deadline confirms that he’s 100% attached. The script, penned by Simon Kinberg, is based on a story by Singer and is set to carry on the series’ trend of time-jumping, picking up ten years after the ‘past’ (1973) events of  Days Of Future Past.

It’s been heavily rumoured that the flick will once more merge the two casts – the original X-team from the first trilogy with the younger First Class crew – as the X-Men will join forces to battle an ancient evil known as Apocalypse. It’s already been confirmed that the eighties will receive a colossal amount of destruction, which is to be expected from a chap called Apocalypse. Set a whopping 21 years after the events of First Class, the more youthful members of that cast will presumably don some bangin’ prosthetics. Or you know, their mutant abilities ought to mask any age discrepancies.

In a chat today with Yahoo! Movies (via Coming Soon), Kinberg confirmed that the flick will be more of a continuation of the ‘past’ element from DoFP, with an emphasis on that line-up of X-characters:

“The X-Men film that we’re working on now as everybody knows is X-Men: Apocalypse and that really follows the stories of the let’s say First Class X-Men. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, many others of that generation of X-Men. So, in future X-Men films? Perhaps, but in Apocalypse it will really be the continuation of the ‘past’ of Days of Future Past.”

So, err, what about Wolvie? No baby Storm or an adolescent Jean Grey?

“If we included some of the original X-Men, like Storm, Jean, Scott, and others, yeah we would have to recast them, because Apocalypse takes place a good twenty years before “X1,” which now insanely was fifteen years ago. It would be very hard to do. Halle, Famke, and Jimmy, and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those characters to life and they’re so identified, those actors, with the parts now. So it would be a tall task, but I also would have said before First Class there would be no way we could find actors who could stand alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and I think we managed to with Michael and James finding their own interpretation of the characters, not doing an impersonation. So, are we going to have to recast? If some of those characters were in the movie we would, but we’ll see.”

Hmmm. He’s keeping his cards close to his chest on precisely which characters are likely to appear. With a preponderance of Apocalypse-related storylines free to pilfer from the comic book canon, there’s nothing out of the question. Marvel’s varying universes have pretty much most of the X-Men, both old and new, coming into contact with Apocalypse.

Singer’s back on board, Kinberg’s scripting… whoever winds up on the big screen, you can guarantee it’s going to be worth the suspenseful wait.

X-Men: Apocalypse opens in theatres on May 27th, 2016.