The future of the X-Men films is finally beginning to gain some weight, with a big-name writer now linked to the project.
OK, so we know Wolverine is heading to screens, stat, in Deadpool & Wolverine. But the next chapter of the full X-Men story may be in the hands of Michael Lesslie.
He is in talks to take on writing duties for the X-Men arm of the MCU, according to Deadline.
Lesslie has three major movie writing roles under his belt so far.
These are 2015’s Macbeth, 2016’s Assassin’s Creed and 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.
Two are fairly well-regarded and, well, the other is Assassin's Creed, which The Guardian called an “interminable, lifeless mess.”
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Lesslie also wrote on John Le Carre TV adaptation The Little Drummer GIrl, a 2018 series directed by Park Chan-Wook.
News of the X-Men side of the MCU hasn't exactly been buzzing of late.
At the end of September 2023, Deadline reported execs were preparing to hear pitches for the future of the X-Men movies, following the end of the writers' and actors’ guild strikes.
This means we're still years away from a dedicated X-Men movie actually making it to screens.
The last main line entry was 2019's X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which was poorly reviewed and reportedly lost 20th Century Fox $133 million. It was followed-up by spin-off The New Mutants, which has cheaper to make but made just $49 million at the box office — although it was released in August 2020, a pretty horrible time for any movie to come out in cinemas.
After that, the X-Men movie rights moved over to the MCU, after Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox.
2024 is still a big year for X-Men, despite the full-on X-Men movie being miles off. First, X-Men ’97 proved a smash hit that tapped deep into 90s nostalgia while being a quality show in its own right.
Deadpool & Wolverine will also be a test of whether relative MCU cinematic outsiders can have box office impact at a time when most traditional Marvel superhero movies are flopping pretty hard. The film is out on July 25.
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