X-Men: Days Of Future Past screenwriter Simon Kinberg has been hitting the promotional circuit pretty hard due to this month’s release of Days Of Future Past on DVD and Blu-ray, but as one might expect, he’s spent a lot of time talking about the upcoming sequel to that film, X-Men: Apocalypse. In one of his most recent interviews, Kinberg shed a little light on which supporting characters will get more of the spotlight during the next installment of the hit franchise.
“The relationship between Beast and Mystique is a really interesting one that we didn’t have a lot of time to explore in Days of Future Past, so we’ll have an opportunity to do more of that in Apocalypse,” Kinberg told Collider.
After establishing a connection between the shape-changing mutant Mystique played by Jennifer Lawrence and the brilliant (and later blue-furred) mutant known as Beast played by Nicholas Hoult in X-Men: First Class, the pair’s relationship was pushed to the back burner in Days Of Future Past, which continued to focus on the dynamic between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender). That, as well as the film’s time-twisting narrative bridge between the old X-Men franchise and the new one, left little room for exploring the duo’s evolution both as individual characters and as two people with a deep, personal connection.
“Part of what’s really interesting about Mystique’s character is that she is, in some ways, the child of both Erik and Charles,” explained Kinberg. “She grew up with Charles and then she sort of became a woman with Erik, so her being the cross-pollination, if you will, of those two philosophies and those two men is something we can explore in the movie too.”
Although Kinberg previously described Apocalypse as the final chapter in a “trilogy,” the writer indicated that this description doesn’t necessarily mean audiences have seen the last of any of the characters involved in the three-part story that’s been told with First Class, Days Of Future Past, and the upcoming Apocalypse.
“I will say that [X-Men: Apocalypse] is definitely the close of a trilogy for those First Class characters — which isn’t to say we won’t see them in future movies, hopefully we will, but it’s a completion of an arc for them,” he said. “I think that the friendship between Erik and Charles, which has always been so integral to the franchise, is something we’re continuing to explore and hopefully deepen with Apocalypse.”
X-Men: Apocalypse hits theaters May 27, 2016.
