Yesterday was a busy day for us at Comic-Con and before the Sony panel for Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium, ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype had a chance to sit down with the movie’s producer Simon Kinberg, an incredibly prolific Hollywood writer and producer, and we asked about one of his other key projects, the sequel to 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: First Class which he’s currently writing.
Kinberg has been working closely with Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman on the script with hopes to start shooting next spring for its July 2014 release date and that’s been taking up the bulk of his life.
Kinberg admitted the “X-Men” franchise is one he absolutely adored but more importantly, he gave us a few hints on the direction they’ll be taking with it and the characters they want to focus on.
“I’m not allowed to even breathe a word of any sort of details but I can say that the things that we thought worked well in ‘First Class’ were the characters, especially the four or five lead characters. The Charles-Erik relationship was obviously incredibly resonant and James and Michael did such an amazing job as those characters. Jen Lawrence and Nick Hoult, that’s a really interesting relationship between Raven and Hank, so we’re really going to be focusing on character and personally I really liked the period aspect of ‘First Class’ so we may well do that.”
We also spoke with Kinberg about his relationship with developing this reboot of sorts with director Matthew Vaughn and the decision to bring him back after he departed X-Men: The Last Stand quite suddenly.
“I was involved with X-Men: The Last Stand and I was the producer of X-Men: First Class, so I was with (Matthew) for both since he was going to direct X3 and Matthew and I and Zak Penn really wrote that together. Matthew was in the room with us breaking the story and then he went away off X3 for various reasons and when ‘X-Men: First Class’ came back around, which I developed with Lauren Schuler-Donner and Bryan Singer as producers. Right around the time ‘Kick-Ass’ came out, we were looking for a director and we all saw ‘Kick-Ass’ and we all were like, ‘You know, we wanted him before, he’s a fantastically-skilled director ” I mean, I thought ‘Kick-Ass’ was astounding, another sort of groundbreaking movie, and we ended up back in the X-Men world with him. I thought he did such a great job with ‘First Class’ that it gave us all license to do some really ambitious things with the sequel.”
We also wondered how important it was that these prequels connect to the other three movies, because we certainly found a few discrepancies in First Class which were somewhat distracting, being that we’re such fans of the characters and some of the things done in the first three movies. Here’s what he said on whether these movies should be seen as prequels or straight reboots.
“It’s an interesting thing and I wouldn’t know how to define it because we tried to be as respectful as possible in ‘First Class’ to the ‘Singer-verse,’ to ‘X1-3’ really, and there are places where we diverged from that and broke that, but there were other places where we were really respectful to, like even little silly things like the Rebecca Romijn cameo, so we are constructing it with ‘X1-3’ in mind. There may be some places where we don’t line up perfectly but it is something we are very aware of and want to be respectful of and the people who are responsible for those movies–Lauren Schuler-Donner, Bryan Singer and Fox–are all involved.”
Look for the rest of our video interview with Kinberg over on ComingSoon.net, talking about Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium sometime soon.
