The director of Thunderbolts, Jake Schreier, is in line to direct an upcoming X-Men movie.
According to Deadline, Schreier is in “early talks” with Marvel about taking the director’s chair.
It’s not hard to understand why. Thunderbolts received the best reviews for a Marvel movie in years.
It achieved a Metacritic score of 68%, just one per cent off the 69% of the original Avengers film. And miles better than the 42% of Captain America: Brave New World from earlier this year.
Its $76 million box office US opening was also seen as healthy, given its title doesn’t rely on one of the existing big-name Marvel superheroes.
The future of the X-Men
Last year we heard Michael Lesslie had been hired to work on the X-Men movie script. He wrote the last Hunger Games movie, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and TV series The Little Drummer Girl, as well as the less celebrated Assassin’s Creed film adaptation.
There’s been more eye-opening X-Men news recently too. Ryan Reynolds is rumoured to be working on a movie pitch, one that will feature Deadpool and “three or four” X-Men characters, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Let’s hope that won’t be how we’re properly reintroduced to the X-Men in this new era of Marvel, though.
If you head back to the X-Men movies of 2000-2014, they are relatively serious, and lack the at times tedious self-referential nature of the massively successful Deadpool & Wolverine.
However, much as Marvel has at least partly lost its way since the end of the Thanos era, the last few mainline X-Men movies were perceived as representing a major drop-off in quality. And 2020’s The New Mutants was a critical and box office disaster, not helped by releasing in the era of covid lockdowns.
Around that time, in March 2019, Disney acquired the rights to the X-Men characters, which is why the conversation of how they will be subsumed into the MCU has been a topic of debate for the last few years.
Very little else is known about the next X-Men movie. There are no casting details, or hints on what direction the story may take. Marvel has not given it a tentative release date either, suggesting 2027 is the earliest it may arrive.
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