Simon Kinberg first boarded the X-Men franchise when he was tasked to collaborate with Zak Penn on the screenplay for The Last Stand once Brett Ratner had been hired to direct, and his influence over the superhero series continued to grow across the next decade.
As either a writer or producer he was credited on First Class, Days of Future Past, both of Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool movies, Apocalypse, Logan and The New Mutants, while he made his feature directorial debut on Dark Phoenix and delivered one of the worst entries in the thirteen-film saga, not to mention the biggest box office bomb of 2019.
Inconsistency aside, few within the industry are better-placed to comment on the future of the mutants than Kinberg, who revealed what he wanted to see from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s reboot in an interview with CBR.
“There’s also a part of me that feels like I’m really interested to see what they will do with it, to make it different if I’m not a part of it, or even if I am a part of it. Not to sound bombastic, but it’s a little bit like Shakespeare, where a million people have played Hamlet. There’s been tons of fascinating versions of Hamlet. I myself started with the original X-Men cast and then went into the First Class cast and then put them together in a movie and split them back up again and did something very different with Logan than what we were doing with Wolverine and the X-Men mainline franchise.
So there’s just so many different ways you can go tonally and cast-wise. I’m excited to see what they do. I don’t have any hopes for what they do. I know it’s gonna be cool because everything they do is cool and smart and really well thought-out. As a fan of the comics and as a fan of Marvel movies, I literally can’t wait. So yeah, I’d certainly be open to being involved. If not, will be first in line and wildly excited to see what they do.”
Audiences all over the world have become more than familiar with plenty of X-Men characters, with the team’s adventures hauling in over $6 billion at the box office. It would arguably be a smarter move on Kevin Feige’s part if he were to deliberately avoid the A-list names and focus on heroes we’ve never seen in live-action before, because it’s not as if there aren’t plenty to choose from looking at the sheer depth of the Marvel Comics back catalogue.
