After a heavy amount of anticipation, X-Men: Days of Future Past is now finally out in theaters, and naturally everyone wants to know “what’s next?”  The sequel, X-Men: Apocalypse, is already dated for release on May 27, 2016, and director Bryan Singer plans to return to the director’s chair on the pic, which will follow the First Class cast of characters plus Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in the 1980s.  Obviously the title confirms that the comics supervillain Apocalypse will be the “Big Bad” in Apocalypse, but we don’t know much about how the character will be utilized in the follow-up.

We recently spoke with Days of Future Past and Apocalypse screenwriter Simon Kinberg about the DOFP post-credits scene and how it leads to the sequel, and the scribe revealed that the actor seen at the end of Days of Future Past won’t necessarily return for the follow-up and implied that X-Men: Apocalypse won’t be returning to the setting glimpsed in the post-credits scene.  Kinberg also discussed how they came up with the tease that became the post-credits tag.  Read on after the jump.  Obviously spoilers for the Days of Future Past tag follow.

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Image by Dave Wilkins via Wiki

Kinberg told us that he and the filmmaking team did not settle on the Apocalypse storyline for the Days of Future Past sequel until they were in the midst of production on DOFP, because they had previously been so focused on getting the first film off the ground.  Once they did start discussing Apocalypse, however, Kinberg reiterated their desire to delve into the disaster subgenre:

“During production, we all spent time talking about what the sequel would be, what we could do that could continue and deepen the character stories that we’ve been following through First Class and Days of Future Past, and in a way explore a different genre.  I think one of the things that my favorite superhero comic book movies do is they’re superhero comic book movies, but they also have their own subgenre.  With Days of Future Past, it’s a science-fiction time-travel movie, which is its own genre, and with Apocalypse it’s an opportunity to do a disaster movie juxtaposed with superheroes, and that’s something we haven’t really seen before.”

As for the post-credits sequence, Kinberg says they went through a number of variations before settling on the “Apocalypse builds the pyramids” scene:

“Once we sort of committed to [Apocalypse] being the sequel that we were going to pursue, we felt like the tag was an opportunity to start to set that up or just tease that for audiences.  We went through a lot of ideas for what that scene could be, and some of them were reported erroneously online, some of them were pretty close to the way people reported them online, but we landed on what the final version was toward the end of production.  So we didn’t have time in our initial round of photography to film it, we filmed it when we went back up to Montreal after principal photography, with obviously an entirely different cast, but with our crew.”

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Kinberg confirmed that the young actor who played Apocalypse in the post-credits tag “won’t necessarily” be the Apocalypse that we see in X-Men: Apocalypse, adding that the follow-up might not even return to the Ancient Egypt setting:

“The tag is a tease of Apocalypse’s origin backstory.  It’s not necessarily gonna be a part of the storytelling of the Apocalypse movie.  It was really just to sort of tease for the audience, ‘There’s this new guy out there and he’s coming.’”

I, for one, was really hoping to see the follow-up return to Ancient Egypt because I think it would be neat to see how history’s first mutant interacted with humans in that time period.  One imagines the focus of X-Men: Apocalypse will primarily deal with how the X-Men bring down the adult Apocalypse in a more modern setting, but hopefully they can at least give us a glimpse of the antagonist's backstory.

Watch the portion of Steve’s interview with Kinberg regarding the Days of Future Past post-credits tag and X-Men: Apocalypse below.

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For more with Simon Kinberg: