After the success of X-Men: Days of Future Past–which bested any previous X-Men movie at the box office by $300-million–director Bryan Singer and producer/co-writer Simon Kinberg aren’t afraid to stack the deck of mutant stories to explore in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. Collider sat down with the prolific Kinberg and got the skinny on several new developments for the prequel/sequel.
Besides going into more depth on the famously contentious friendship between Charles Xavier/Professor X (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Apocalypse will once again explore the romance between Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) first teased in X-Men: First Class.
“The relationship between Beast and Mystique is a really interesting one that we didn’t have a lot of time to explore in ‘Days of Future Past,'” said Kinberg, “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.”
Keeping Mystique front-and-center is also important because Lawrence is a HUGE star now, and they need her fanbase to justify what’s shaping up to be a very BIG movie.
“There are some very big set pieces,” Kinberg divulges. “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.'”
Kinberg describes the new movie as “the close of a trilogy,” one that has so far chronicled mutant life in America during the ’60s and ’70s, so it was natural that the closing chapter bring us to the 1980s.
“We’re having a lot of fun with the idea of the ’80s,” adds Kinberg. “It’s a decade that Bryan and I both grew up in and so the music, the style, the aesthetic, the legacy of ’80s movies is something we’re really having fun with.”
Once again directed by Bryan Singer from a script by Kinberg, Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris, cameras will start rolling in Montreal on FOX’s X-Men: Apocalypse in April, 2015 for a May 27, 2016 release.
