D23 gave us the stars of the next X-Men movie, and the first team movie from Marvel Studios. Now that we know some of the cast, director Jake Schreier’s able to offer up a little more information on what he plans to do with these characters.
After the cast reveal, he told Good Morning America about his want to do things not done before with these characters. “One of the great things about the comics is their rich and broad history. One of the first things Kevin [Feige] and I talked about was, They’ve made great movies in this world before. Let’s find the things that haven’t recently been done in all these other corners of the universe.”
That much, Schreier and the film’s co-writer Lee Sung Jin have separately said before. However, the interesting thing here is the specific X-Men runs Schreier mentions. Along with going back to the comics written by Chris Claremont, he brought up Jonathan Hickman. Claremont’s a given, since he wrote the X-Men for 16 years, but Hickman, not so much: the Secret Wars and Midnight writer famously led the charge in rebooting the mutants in 2019 starting with the Krakoan era. He may have left well before it ended, but his writing did set up characters like Emma Frost, Storm, and Mister Sinister as major players during the rest of that period and to their current, island-free lives.
Whether that means mutants aren’t around because most of them are on an island (Krakoa or not), Schreier’s comments shed a bit more light on what to expect before X-Men comes to theaters on May 5, 2028. Like he said, there’s “so many stories that are still untold to honor and reach into.” Hopefully that means he’s fully serious about not just playing the hits and trying to get the Phoenix Saga right again.
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