Director Bryan Singer’s time-traveling mutant adventure X-Men: Days of Future Past doesn’t arrive in theaters for another few weeks, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from asking the film’s cast and creative team about the next movie in the franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse.
In an interview with SuperHeroHype, Days of Future Past writer and producer Simon Kinberg weighed in on Apocalypse, which he’s also writing and producing for the franchise. Currently scheduled for release May 27, 2016, X-Men: Apocalypse will introduce one of the team’s most powerful recurring foes, the ancient mutant called Apocalypse.
“The biggest and funnest challenge of the Apocalypse movie to me is his character,” said Kinberg. “How do you create a new villain for the X-Men world that is as good as any villain that’s come before, is compelling philosophically as Magneto, not just in his physical powers, but in his philosophical depth. Apocalypse is going to be a fun movie to write and make.”
In the Marvel Comics universe, Apocalypse is a mutant with a wide-range of powers that make him effectively immortal and give him the ability to change his shape, density, and makeup down to the individual atoms of his body. Obsessed with the nature of evolution and the principle of survival of the fittest, Apocalypse has often attempted to eradicate all non-mutants in order to pave the way for the ascension of mutants as the superior, more genetically “fit” inhabitants of the world.
“We want to tell the Apocalypse story and there’s massive scale and scope to telling that story,” explained Kinberg. “There’s going to be set pieces that I suspect are going to be bigger than anything we’ve ever done in an X-Men movie before and he’s a great character.”
X-Men: Days of Future Past hits theaters May 23.