MASSIVE X-MEN ROUND-UP: X-Men, New Mutants, X-Force, Deadpool, Legion and Hellfire – it’s all here

With X-Men: Apocalypse only a few days away now people are already looking to the future of the franchise. None moreso than the people behind the movies, it seems.

Ok, so first up, it looks like Xavier himself, James McAvoy is set to appear in Josh Boone’s upcoming New Mutants movie, according to X-Men producer Smon Kinberg who has confirmed that at this moment in time Professor X is in the script and, unless the script changes, they are confident that’s a done deal.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about who will be in the New Mutants team as Boone himself has said he wants the team ot be mostly new and include: Wolfsbane, Magik, Mirage, Cannonball, Sunspot and Warlock.

We’re also hearing that Game of Thrones star Maisie williams – that’s Arya Stark, folks – will be Wolfsbane, with The Witch’s Anya Taylor-Joy as Magik and Apocalypse’s Alexandra Shipp back as Storm.

You can check out the cool concept art for the X-Force movie below:

The art features Warpath, Cable (who’ll also star in Deadpool 2), Domino, Cannonball and Feral.

Warpath featured in X-Men: Days of Future Past as played by Booboo Stewart; it’s anyone’s guess if we’ll see him back or if the role will be recast for X-force.

In case you’re unsure of who they all are:

“Warpath is a super-strong Native American, Cable is the son of Cyclops, Domino is a marksman (think Hawkeye) with the ability to alter probability in her favor (and has been romantically linked to Cable), Cannonball can create force fields and fly at jet speeds, and Feral is a mutant with feline qualities who has been portrayed as both a hero and a villain in the comics. In Semkow’s concept art, Feral looks more like Rogue than her comic book counterpart.”

We’e also hearing that Sunspot, Mirage and Cannonball – seen in the concept art for X-Force above – .will appear in the New Mutants movie… this could mean the studio is really trying to tie X-Men, X-Force, New Mutants and, by default, Deadpool together.

Interestingly, Bryan singer has been chatting about Deadpool fitting into the greater X-Men universe and reckons it’s certainly possible, if a little tricky: “If you take a character as irreverent and meta as Deadpool and connect him to something as grounded and serious as X-Men, you have to do it carefully and gently. When you drop them all in together it can be a disaster. That has to be done delicately, but there’s plenty of room to do it.”

Singer has also talked about the upcoming TV shows Legion and Hellfire and how it will all fit togther. He says the universe is just as big as the MCU and there’s a lot of possibilites: “I think the underbelly [could be explored].

“There’s always something interesting about a school that’s got a military aspect beneath its classrooms. Is there another layer to all of that? Is there another layer to the Hellfire Club? The idea of, ‘Who’s running the world?’ — that’s something that was touched upon in ‘First Class’ but has yet to be fully explored. It just has to be explored in a very gentle, methodical way. And I’ve seen it go haywire. I’m not going to be specific where I believe it has. The audience will tell you. But when it’s done right, it all can connect.”

He also seems keen to hang around the X-Men universe which, let’s be honest, he’s largely responsible for being so popular and he’s not saying he’s not going to direct more installments: “When you spend nearly two decades in a universe, to simply say, ‘I’m done,’ or, ‘I’m going to abandon it,’ just wouldn’t make sense to me. I’m very connected to this universe and a lot of these actors, and also the characters, whomever plays them. So never say never.”

Finally, with the X-Men timeline now firmly rebooted, it looks like the currnet trend of moving forward a decade each movie – X-Men: First Class was set in the 1960s, X-Men: Days of Future Past, took place in the 1970s, X-Men: Apocalypse is in the 1980s – is set to continue with the next X-Men movie, whatever it may be. Or at least so says Simon Kinberg has revealed that: “The next one is set in the ’90s”.

Before we get ready to wrap up, we thought this was an interesting little tidbit about how Psylocke came to be in the movie:

Simon Kinberg has revealed that the fourth Horseman was originally… Xavier! What?

“The one person we didn’t know was Psylocke, and the reason why is because originally in the script we sort of… I don’t know why we made this decision, but we knew that Professor X was abducted in the middle of the movie, and we thought that almost counted as a fourth Horseman And so that’s the way we constructed the original draft of the script. There wasn’t going to be a fourth one. The ‘surprise’ was that Xavier was the fourth Horseman. And then when we were working on the script, Bryan and I at one particular point – pretty late in the process – said, ‘He’s not really a Horseman – he’s not doing anything in the third act of the movie.’”

From there Kinberg and singer went to the source material – the comics – to choose the fourth actual Horseman and cam up with Psylocke: “We started talking about who that would be, and just literally looked at the list of different Horsemen over the history of the comics, and Psylocke was the one we thought was the most intriguing,” Kinberg says.

“And, ironically, or as fate would have it, I had just met with Olivia Munn about Deadpool – like a week or two before. And Bryan and I were up in Montreal, and I said, ‘You know, Olivia Munn could be an interesting Psylocke,’ so we went on the internet and Googled her images. And one of the first things that popped up was a piece of fan art of Olivia as Psylocke.”

So there you have it… X-Men madness.

You’re welcome.

Oh, but before you go, check out James McAvoy face-timing Patrick Stewart as he gets the head shaved to play Xavier:

Oh, and here’s Cyclops getting his powers for the first time in Apocalypse

Sources: Screencrush, Screencrush, Screencrush, Comingsoon, Variety and Newsarama