It’s been generally assumed that X-Men: Days Of Future Past director Bryan Singer would return for 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, but 20th Century Fox made it official this week with confirmation that Singer will be behind the camera when Apocalypse begins rolling.
X-Men: Apocalypse will be Singer’s fourth film in the X-Men franchise, having directed both X-Men and X2: X-Men United before taking a break from the franchise, then returning for Days Of Future Past. The script for Apocalypse is being penned by Simon Kinberg, Mike Dougherty, and Dan Harris.
While plot details for the film are scarce, Kinberg recently suggested that if any characters from the original franchise — such as Cyclops or Jean Grey — do return for Apocalypse, they would need to be recast.
“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 [X-Men], which now insanely was 15 years ago,” said Kinberg in a question-and-answer session on Yahoo.
“It would be very hard to do. Halle [Berry], Famke [Janssen], and Jimmy [Marsden], 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 [Fassbender] and James [McAvoy] 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.”
Along with the indication that the film will be set in the ’80s, McAvoy has also hinted that his version of Charles Xavier may finally go bald in this installment of the franchise.
X-Men: Apocalypse hits theaters May 27, 2016.
