Bryan Singer, the director of three exceptional X-Men films including Days of Future Past, will return to direct the fourth from 20th Century Fox. This comes after some serious legal matters and charges brought up against Singer, but Fox has maintained their stance that they wanted Singer for Apocalypse from the start. The latest film, written by Simon Kinberg (Days of Future Past), will mainly involve the cast of characters established in First Class and not so much the old guard. Since First Class took place in the 60’s and Future Past the 70’s, the logical next step is the 1980’s. Kinberg revealed a few character details in an interview with Yahoo!
The X-Men film that we’re working on now as everybody knows is X-Men: Apocalypse and that really follows the stories of the let’s say ‘First Class’ X-Men. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, many others of that generation of X-Men. So, in future X-Men films? Perhaps, but in ‘Apocalypse’ it will really be the continuation of the ‘past’ of ‘Days of Future Past.’
If we included some of the original X-Men, like Storm, Jean, Scott, and others, yeah we would have to recast them, because Apocalypse takes place a good twenty years before “X1,” which now insanely was fifteen years ago. It would be very hard to do. Halle, Famke, and Jimmy, and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those characters to life and they’re so identified, those actors, with the parts now. So it would be a tall task, but I also would have said before “First Class” there would be no way we could find actors who could stand alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and I think we managed to with Michael and James finding their own interpretation of the characters, not doing an impersonation. So, are we going to have to recast? If some of those characters were in the movie we would, but we’ll see.
X-Men: Apocalypse will start shooting next spring and has a theatrical debut set for May 27, 2016.