It’s hard to imagine an X-Men movie bigger than X-Men: Days of Future Past, what with its multiple timelines, ginormous cast, and time travel shenanigans, but those involved with X-Men: Apocalypse continue to reiterate that it will be the biggest X-Men movie yet.  20th Century Fox recently confirmed that Bryan Singer will indeed be returning to direct, and he’s been hard at work developing the script with DOFP scribe Simon Kinberg and X2 screenwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty.

Filming is scheduled to get underway next spring in anticipation of the film’s May 27, 2016 release date, and to promote the upcoming Blu-ray release of DOFP, Kinberg recently answered a number of fan questions about the franchise.  Chiefly, Kinberg revealed that the thrust of Apocalypse is to “complete the trilogy” that was initially set up in X-Men: First Class.  Hit the jump for much more, including the possibility of seeing younger versions of the original X-Men.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Speaking with Yahoo! Movies UK in an extended Q&A, Kinberg talked about the main focus of Apocalypse:

“The thrust of Apocalypse is really to complete the trilogy we began with First Class - to complete the stories of young Raven, young Hank, younger Charles and Erik. And complete this trilogy of four people who began the films sort of disparate and in different worlds…[and who] we’ve followed through the span of decades. So that’ll be the thrust. There will be familiar characters and new characters that we haven’t seen…ever…but it’ll be the completion of what we began in First Class.”

We know that Apocalypse takes place in the 1980s and focuses mainly on the First Class cast (plus Wolverine) as opposed to the future DOFP characters, and since First Class was Erik’s story and DOFP was Charles’ story, I wonder if Apocalypse will showcase Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven. 

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Image via 20th Century Fox

But if this film “completes the trilogy” so to speak, I wonder where the series goes from here.  There have been rumblings that Apocalypse might introduce younger versions of characters like Cyclops, Storm, and Jean Grey, and while Kinberg was careful not to reveal if they would or would not show up in Apocalypse, he confirmed that if they did, the roles would be recast:

“If we included some of the original X-Men, like Storm, Jean, Scott and others in Apocalypse, yeah we would have to recast them because Apocalypse takes place a good 20 years before X1 which now insanely is 10-15 years ago. It would be very hard to do. Halle [Berry], Famke [Janssen] and James [Marsden] have done such a wonderful job bringing those characters to life and have been so identified with the parts. It would be a tall task, but I also would’ve said before First Class that there was no way we’d find actors to stand alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, and we did with Michael [Fassbender] and James [McAvoy]. Are we going to have to recast? If some of characters are in the movie, we would. But we shall wait and see.”

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Image via 20th Century Fox

For the record, Kinberg confirmed that DOFP did indeed inflict massive changes on the series timeline:

“We changed the timeline for everything that came after DOFP - so X-Men 1, 2 and 3, even The Wolverine. So Jean [Grey] was not killed in Last Stand, nor was Scott, and a whole lot of other things rippled.”

As for new mutants, Kinberg said that Psylocke nearly made it into DOFP:

“She’s a fan favourite, and also a favourite of mine. We have a small part that she plays in Last Stand, and we talked about including her in DOFP quite seriously actually. There was a version of the script she was in and we even auditioned some actors in Montreal. But we didn’t feel there was enough of a part she would play in a movie that was already full of many, many mutants.

She has a cool power. I know Bryan thinks she’s a neat character so there’s certainly a chance she’ll be in an X-Men movie some day. Hopefully there’ll be a lot of X-Men movies and there’s lot of mutants we’re yet to fully explore onscreen, even if they’ve had cameos before. Now we’re making more films there’s a chance to dig deeper.”

Head over to Yahoo! Movies UK for much, much more from Kinberg on Apocalypse and the X-Men universe as a whole.  If you didn’t already envy the guy’s position, I’ll remind you that he’s also involved in the new Star Wars films and is producing The Fantastic Four for Fox.

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X-Men: Apocalypse Story First Class Trilogy