You may recognize the name Simon Kinberg as one of the executives in charge of FOX’s Marvel division. This guy is mostly responsible for our X-Men and Fantastic Four movies and moving forward, Deadpool and Gambit! For all intents and purposes Deadpool and Gambit are both mutants and ergo belong to the X-Men category, but hey, they get their own movies now! Hooray! Any-who, Simon Kinberg sat down with JoBlo.com and had a massive interview, but these are just a couple of quotes. If you want to read the whole thing, hit that link below!
Of course the question on everybody’s mind is whether or not Deadpool and Gambit are connected to the X-Men movies (and Fantastic Four too but we won’t pretend we heard that). How did Kinberg respond? He said, “Well this movie takes place chronologically before those other films, so it’s more like those films have to acknowledge this than we acknowledge Gambit, Deadpool, or Fantastic Four or anything else that exists within the sort of Fox/Marvel universe. But I work on all of those films in one capacity or another, either as a producer on all of them and as a writer on Fantastic Four and this movie, so I’m certainly aware of all the different stories we’re telling at the same time, and they all are part of a larger fabric now, and so the world of Deadpool, the world of Gambit, exists in a post-Days of Future Past post-Apocalypse world where all of these stories are the same as our shared history. The same way that each of us of different ages knows about Nixon and knows about Reagan and knows about 9/11, our fictitious events like the stadium dropping on the White House in 1973 is part of the world in which Gambit, Deadpool, Wolverine on forward exists.”
Kinberg also went on to describe the primary focus of Apocalypse since we probably won’t be seeing much of Hugh Wolverine Jackman. Who do we get to look forward to? How about Cyclops and Jean Grey! “They’re really protagonists in the movie, as much as Erik and Charles and Hank and Raven and Apocalypse, the final two are really Jean and Scott. In the same way that we told the origin story of those four characters in First Class and continued in Days of Future Past, this is the origin story of Jean and Scott. They’re very young characters who are struggling with their powers—both of them—and at sort of different points in their lives understanding what it is to be a mutant, and controlling or not controlling their powers. This is a very different Jean and Scott from the Famke and James Marsden characters that we know from the original trilogy, they are almost opposites in some ways. Scott is not the squeaky clean leader, he’s actually kind of a messed up kid who’s really struggling to find his place in the world and not happy about being at the school. And Jean, as you saw in the Comic-Con piece, is someone who is also struggling with her power, sort of emotionally and physically.”
Another choice that Kinberg elaborated on was how mutants are perceived in this time after the events of Days of Futures Past. “A big decision we made is that because of the changed timeline of Days of Future Past, it’s not a world in which mutants are hiding or passing anymore, it’s a world in which mutancy is known and the Charles Xavier School for the Gifted wouldn’t be a secret school, it would be a much more open school. The way we’ve imagined the school, the way we’ve written the school, the way we’ve shot the school is a brighter, happier place than we’ve ever seen before, I think, at the beginning of the movie. So that’s part of the backstory too is that he’s been there and not only has this place blossomed into the dream academy, but he even has plans to expand it beyond that. And then Apocalypse messes all that up.”
Finally, Kinberg teased on the next X-Men movie after Apocalypse. “I have to say I was really excited to have Scott and Jean, because I never really got to write [for them]. I mean I wrote X3 but we didn’t really get to focus on those characters the way I would’ve wanted, partly because James Marsden was ironically busy doing Superman. And Famke, the Dark Phoenix story, the way that Matthew Vaughn—who was originally the X3 director—the way that he and Zak Penn, who co-wrote that movie, and I wanted to tell the Dark Phoenix story is a bit different than the way it ended up being told, so we didn’t really get to dig into those characters and they’re such huge, iconic characters in the franchise. I think those are the characters I was most excited about for this film, but there are definitely others. There’s others I’ve tried to get into movies and haven’t been able to and there’s other young versions of characters from the original trilogy that I’d like to play with, so yeah there’s a lot.”
