He turned the Thunderbolts into The New Avengers, and now director Jake Schreier may bring the X-Men into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Deadline reports that the Thunderbolts director “is in early talks” to direct Marvel’s upcoming X-Men project. Michael Lesslie, the writer of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, has been attached as a writer since last summer, while development on the film has been happening for even longer than that. io9 reached out to Marvel for comment or clarification and will update this post if or when we hear back.
This move makes a whole lot of sense, though. Starting with Jon Favreau and all the way up to the Russo brothers, Marvel Studios loves to use directors with whom it has already shared success. And after the strong opening weekend, especially critically, for Thunderbolts, you can totally see how Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the team would want to put such a massive project in trusted hands.
And it is a massive project. Ever since Disney first announced intentions to acquire 20th Century Fox in 2017, fans have been anxiously awaiting the full, proper introduction of Fox’s characters into the MCU. After years, The Fantastic Four are coming in a few weeks, and X-Men characters have slowly been trickling in, headlined by last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
A full X-Men movie has always been the north star, though, and the entire company has been very, very careful about it. Clearly it knows there have been many X-Men movies before, most of them are quite good, and it’s a high bar with some very valuable and beloved characters. It’s unclear who will be on this specific team, or how it will incorporate characters from Deadpool & Wolverine or Avengers: Doomsday, which is bringing back more of the Fox X-Men characters. But, you can say with some certainty that it’ll take place after the events of Avengers: Secret Wars and set the tone for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, over 10 years after the possibility first happened.
What do you think about Schreier doing X-Men? Let us know below.
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