Before the mind-blowing purchase of Fox by Disney, the former had its X-Men franchise still running generally strong with plans to bring the offshoot X-Force to life on the big screen in a solo film after teasing its introduction in 2018’s Deadpool 2 and Jeff Wadlow (Fantasy Island) attached to write and potentially direct the project. But, following the merger, the project was shelved in favor of development on a third Deadpool installment at Marvel Studios as part of their cinematic universe, and now Wadlow has revealed his ideas for the property, including plans for a trilogy.
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In chatting with Comic Book Movie to promote his latest Blumhouse effort, Fantasy Island, Wadlow appealed to Kevin Feige to let him work on any version of X-Men or X-Force the mega-producer is currently developing for the MCU, recalling his life as a filmmaker came from his love of ’90s comics and calling it a “dream come true” to have begun development on the project with comic creator Rob Liefeld.
“What I can share about my take on the property (as it’s not really relevant any more since Deadpool 2 introduced Cable, and I wrote X-Force before Deadpool 1 even came out), is that it asked if X-Men was about mutants who get to go to private school with Wolverine and Professor X, and have the Blackbird swooping down to pick them up, what about the mutants that have to go to public school,” Wadlow described. “What about the ones who don’t have the benefactor looking out for them, and what about the kids who have to figure it out on their own? We then would have introduced that darker, more militant mentor in the form of Cable.”
In addition to his general story and thematic concept for the story, Wadlow also revealed that he plotted out a “three-movie arc” for the team that took them from the ’90s iteration Liefeld had created of the “band of kids fighting for what they believe in” to the third film finding the group having grown and changed and acquiring new members, becoming more like Rick Remender’s vision of the team in the early 2000s.
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Should the project have come to fruition, it would have been Wadlow’s second venture into the comic book adaptation world after 2013’s Kick-Ass 2, which was a modest commercial success but was received much less favorably by critics and audiences, namely in comparison to the 2010 predecessor’s acclaim.
