Collider was able to speak with producer and co-writer Simon Kinberg on the untitled X-Men First Class sequel. He gives little detail but gives the impression the studio is allowing Matthew Vaughn the creative freedom to give the franchise the scale and mythology he wants. Kinberg says the new film is "extraordinarily ambitious, epic and mythic". Time will tell which direction the film will be going but Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence are returning. Simon also confirms the film will begin production in the Spring which was bumped from January. The release date is still aiming for July 18th 2014.
“I wish I could tell you about it, but literally, it’s like the most guarded state secret I’ve ever been around. I can tell you that it’s going really well, and I can tell you that I’ve been working closely with Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman on the script of the movie and that we hope to be shooting in Spring of next year to come out in July of 2014 and that I’m really excited about it, because the only thing I can say, because I have to be extraordinarily vague about it, because the last time I talked to anybody about it, I got in trouble…big trouble…what I can tell you is [that] it’s extraordinarily ambitious. It is unlike the other X-Men movies and yet very much a celebration of the X-Men movies.”
“I don’t know enough of what he [Vaughn] has or hasn’t talked about. I can tell you it’s been a very fluid process in the sense of we really went into it, Matthew, Jane and myself, just wanting to create a movie that was as…I’m very proud of First Class…as dramatic as that movie, I think it is as dramatic as that movie, but more epic, mythic in a way as well. So, there are ideas that we’ve started with that haven’t survived, there are ideas that we started with from conversations we had from making First Class that are going to be in the sequel. So, it’s vague but…”
“It’s one of those movies that, because it’s such a big deal for the studio, they have some sense of what it is that we’re writing and they are ambitious about the movie, too. I don’t know what the budget’s going to be, we’ve got to finish the script before we have a budget, but I would assume that it is a bigger movie than the last in physical scope, and that we have the license to do that because of the success of First Class. And because I think Fox has had success with interesting movies in the last couple of years in the genre, like Planet of the Apes was a really good movie, Chronicle was a cool movie, First Class, they’re just narratively or creatively a little bit more ambitious. So they’ve encouraged us to do that with the sequel.”
Avengers seemingly has changed the level of action a comic book film franchise can handle. We could see the next X-Men installment double it's scale and action sequences. 20th Century Fox has been slowly making their films to meet the demands of audiences. We've seen this with Prometheus earning an R-rating and excellent handling of Rise of The Planet of The Apes and original project Chronicle.
Rumors have been pointing to seeing the Sentinels becoming a major element of the sequel with the inclusion of Days of Future Past being the inspiration for the new film. It could really expand the franchise now that mutants are finally now in the open. Leading to an extremely large sandbox for the characters to play in. Bringing in time travelling and giant robots hunting mutants could help usher this in bridging a lot more of the X-Men heroes/villains. Not to mention including more fan favorite mutants instead of wildly obscure ones.
