Simon Kinberg is a bit of a Kevin Feige figure at Fox for all of their Marvel properties. He wrote Days of Future Past and Apocalypse; he’s produced even more than that and is helping to develop all of their future Marvel properties. That being the case, it was no surprise that he was asked plenty of questions regarding some of those properties while at the Television Critics Association to discuss his upcoming series, Designated Survivor. Thankfully, Slashfilm was there to give us the details.
Let’s start with Deadpool 2. You remember Deadpool, right? Came out in February and has completely changed the way Fox, and a lot of other studios, are now approaching their respective movie universes? A lot of studios are now much more open to their comic book franchise films being much more violent and much more crude in their humor. Well, it sounds like the Deadpool sequel, which will see Ryan Reynolds return as the Merc with the Mouth, is still up to the same thing they did so well in the first one — fourth wall breaking commentary.
As Kinberg says, “I think Deadpool 2 will comment on anything that’s happening in movies today especially in superhero movies.” But, what exactly does that mean? Kinberg elaborated, saying, “The sort of glut or saturation of these movies and the proliferation of sequels is definitely something we’ll play around with.”
The other part of that sequel, a rather large part, is the role of Cable. The big question is who exactly is going to play the role — Kinberg admits that he’s not certain, saying, “I’ve seen rumors from about everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to I can’t even remember. We haven’t cast him is the truth.”
As for Gambit, which we’ve seen suffering from a number of delays, Kinberg tells us that the reason for the delays is,
“I think the truth is when you have these movies that need a very special and unique tone, it takes a little while to find that tone. Deadpool feels like it exploded out of nowhere but it was a ten-year development process on that movie. I think it was honed over those ten years. I hope that Gambit doesn’t take ten years but it takes a little honing to get that tone and that voice exactly right. The character has such a specific voice in the comic in the same way that Deadpool has a specific voice in the comic, that we want to make sure that we capture that voice on the page. Really it’s just about getting a screenplay that is worthy of that character and I think we’re really close right now.”
Even though this means we may not see a Gambit film for a couple more years, this is great news. Fox has a tendency to rush films out to keep up with the other studios at the expense of that film’s quality. X-Men: Apocalypse is a great example of this. That film probably could have used another year or two of development to really nail it down and get it right, but they had demands to meet, especially with Marvel and DC both releasing two super hero films this year.
Finally, he discussed Legion, FX’s upcoming series from Fargo creator Noah Hawley that follows a very complex mutant named David Haller who’s super-heroic mutation manifests itself in his Multiple Personality Disorder — that is, each one of the personalities in his head has their own unique super power. Haller, who goes by Legion, is the son to Professor Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, and is a much more on the “anti” side of being an anti-hero.
As such, Kinberg said of the series,
“Actually Legion came out of a conversation that Noah and I had when I was in Moscow for the release of Days of Future Past. Noah was somebody I really admired and we were talking about doing X-Men TV shows. We had a bunch of different ideas. Legion wasn’t one of them and Noah said to me, ‘I want to do Breaking Bad in the superhero world. I want to actually tell the story about the origin of essentially a villain.’ It evolved from there and became Legion.”
A Breaking Bad for superheroes? As if we weren’t already on board for Legion after the San Diego Comic Con trailer, we’re definitely on board now. Don’t believe us? Than here, watch the trailer. You’re definitely on board now.
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He has two cats and knows all things about Doctor Strange but little else.
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