Home Entertainment New X-MEN: APOCALYPSE details! Plus watch the opening battle scene from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST!

New X-MEN: APOCALYPSE details! Plus watch the opening battle scene from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST!

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If there’s one thing that Marvel Studios proved to everybody else, is that you have to have a plan. They have plans until 2028 for their universe, Sony has a massive Spider-y plan involving sequels and villains, and Warner Bros\DC… Well, they kind a have a plan now, which is a lot better than their old “plan” of just randomly pulling out comic book titles and actors names from a hat and making them. That just leaves Fox, who as the owner of both the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises, is the other big power player in the superhero movie business. They’ve now also got a plan, one that sees it’s first major milestone reached in the soon to be released, fanboy wet dream crossover X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Their plan doesn’t stop there though, and they’ve already begun working on that next major step: X-Men: Apocalypse. Thus far, besides the for title obviously referring to a certain ancient, blue lipped mutant badass (which is a very hard thing to pull off!), we haven’t heard much in the way of official story details and cast involvements, but director Bryan Singer, who will be at the helm for both big X-travaganzas, has decided to drop a few nuggets of mutated info.

Speaking to EW, Singer confirmed that we’ll once again be seeing Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Nicholas Hoult, as the younger versions of Mystique, Magneto, Professor Xavier and Beast, respectively. These younger versions of characters once played onscreen by Rebecca Romijn, Sir Ian McKellan, Sir Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammer, were first introduced in Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class. That movie, and most of the upcoming Days of Future Past, is set in the 70’s, but Singer confirms that Apocalypse will be taking place a decade later, saying that he’s excited “because I want to start introducing familiar characters at different ages and also explore the ‘80s.”

And no, that doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing ol’ En Sabah Nur rocking a tight afro and getting down to some disco, as awesome as that may be. What it does mean though, is that we may see some other returning fan favourite characters in Gambit and Nightcrawler. Nightcrawler was previously portrayed (quite well, I might add) by Alan Cumming in X-Men 2, while the least said about Taylor Kitsch’s Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine the better. No mention yet, on just how they would fit into the story though.

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And that story, will be “somewhat” drawing its inspiration from one the of biggest comic book stories of the 1990’s: “Age of Apocalypse”. For the uninitiated, this arc involved Charles Xavier’s Dissociative Identity Disorder suffering son going back in time and accidentally killing his own father, setting off a chain of events that culminates in an alternate timeline where Apocalypse, a 5000-year old, omnipotent, nigh-immortal mutant, has conquered the world. I would hazard a guess though that “somewhat” actually means “just with the barest of details” as doing another film about time travelling mutants and alternate dystopian futures might just be a bit much, as Singer explains.

“[The movie] won’t necessarily create an alternate universe, but there may be some swapping things that I’m playing with.”

And either those earlier rumours had it very wrong, or Singer is just playing the old media smokescreen game here, but according to the director, Days of Future Past‘s story won’t be leading straight into Apocalypse. Not right away, at least.

“You won’t feel at the end of the movie that it set up Apocalypse. What it does is it sets up possibilities. But what we’ll discover in Apocalypse is that events in this movie made that happen.”

So what can we expect from Apocalypse? Well, it will apparently be playing up the title character’s ancient origins, during which he was worshipped as a god.

“Apocalypse deals with ancient mutancy. What would [ancient] humans have thought mutants were? What would mutants think humans were? You’re dealing with gods and things like that. And what if one survived and what if that found its way into our world?”

According to writer/producer Simon Kinberg, the answer to that last question is “a whole lot of destruction”.

“From a visual standpoint it actually may be a bigger movie than Days of Future Past because there’ll be disaster movie imagery, like the title would imply.”

Apocalypse is one of two X-Men villains that I’ve always wanted to see done on the big screen (the other being Mr. Sinister, who we may actually get to see now that his “creator”, Apocalypse, is here), and although I’m not 100% convinced of Singer taking the franchise back to it’s angsty black leather origins, getting to see En Sabah Nur bring down, well, the apocalypse on some unfortunate superheroes is something I just cannot wait for.

The other X-Men hero I always wanted to see is Bishop, but that geeky wish has already been fulfilled. Omar Sy will be playing the time travelling mutant in X=Men: Days of Future Past, and thanks to this clip that debuted at last night’s MTV movie awards, we finally get to see him, a bunch of other newer/older mutants in action, with this opening battle scene from the movie.

DAT BLINK!

X-Men: Apocalypse is being penned by X2 writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty, and has been scheduled for May 27, 2016. Before then though – very soon actually – we’ll be checking out X-Men: Days of Future Past on May 23, 2014.

Last Updated: April 14, 2014

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