Originally published October 3, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
With Bryan Singer now officially signed on as director, X-Men: Apocalypse is picking up steam ahead of production early in the new year, and producer Simon Kinberg has been speaking to Collider about the latest chapter of Fox’s X-Men franchise, describing it as the “close of a trilogy” for the cast of X-Men: First Class. Here’s what he had to say:
“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. 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. And the relationship between Beast and Mystique is a really interesting one that we didn’t have a lot of time to explore in X-Men: Days of Future Past, so we’ll have an opportunity to do more of that in Apocalypse. Part of what’s really interesting about Mystique’s character is that she is, in some ways, the child of both Erik and Charles. 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.”
Kinberg then went on to touch upon the 1980s setting, as well as discussing Fox’s confidence in the creative team following the success of X-Men: Days of Future Past: “There are some very big set pieces. I don’t know what the budget’s gonna be because we’re still a ways away from budgeting the film, but I can say that Fox has a lot of creative confidence in the team that made Days of Future Past—myself, Bryan, Lauren Shuler Donner, Hutch Parker. All of those people are coming back so in terms of a sandbox they’re definitely giving us a lot of room to play creatively and take chances the way that we took some chances on Days of Future Past, and do some radical things just as I think we did some radical things in Days of Future Past.”
