If you’re not excited about the X-Men: First Class sequel just yet, the just-announced title of the film may help get your pulse racing a bit.
Producer Bryan Singer announced last week the follow-up to last year’s First Class will be called X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Comic book fans will recognize the title from an iconic arc by the same name.
The fan-favorite story arc alternates between the present and a future where the X-Men fail to overturn Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and now mutants are forced to live in internment camps. It’s up to the present day X-Men to prevent this timeline from occurring.
“I can say it’s being written right now and it will start shooting in a few months. It’s going to be very ambitious,” Singer told IGN. “It’s called ‘Days of Future Past’ and it deals with aspects of that comic but also some very new things. I just don’t want to give any of it away. Matthew Vaughn will be directing and I’m totally excited about it.”
Of course, just because the movie is using the title doesn’t necessarily mean it can or will follow the arc of the popular storyline. But if it did and did it right…..WOW!
Interesting. I can’t see the Shadowcat character going back in time as she hasn’t been really used or shown in the new series, so maybe it’ll be a tie-in with the Wolverine series and it’ll be Logan who goes back in time to stop the events that lead to the bleak future. This way they boost the X-Men franchise and can get some momentum (not that it needs it) going for the next Wolverine movie.
It makes sense to me, at least.
Nah, I think they may still use Kitty Pryde, especially since Ellen Page is bankable right now. I just hope they’re really careful with this. Hasn’t been a really good time travel movie in years.
So, you’re saying you’ve never read the “Days of Future Past” story arc, either in original form or in the collected graphic novel? 😉
Kitty Pryde is THE focal character in the time travel scenario, and we’re also first introduced to Rachel Summers, daughter of Jean Grey and Scott Summers from a timeline where Jean Grey never died. It would be completely wrong if they didn’t use her!
whoops… my rabid X-Men fangirl slip is showing, isn’t it?
That said, I wonder if we’ll ever see a movie featuring or including Rachel or Illyana.
See, this is where my fanboy and Hollywood sense have to part ways. I hated the X-Men movies because they weren’t the X-Men… they were a Hollywoodized morphing of what I know to be the x-men… so I don’t and CAN’T expect Hollywood to stay true to the franchise because they haven’t in all 4 movies. I contend that they’ll take enough pieces out of the storyline to make it similar to the original, but it will NOT be the Days of Future Past we know and love. So, while it makes sense form a Fanboy (or girl) perspective to have Kitty as the central character… that isn’t happening – you know it, I know it.
Movie aren’t comic books. Different mediums have different rules. Por ejemplo, you know why a musical number would never work in a comic boook, but can work in a movie or on TV? Know why certain puns/jokes needs to be heard in order to work? If not, then you really need to go back to English class my friend.
I disagree. How can you say they weren’t X-Men?
X-Men 1 was a decent introduction, given how many characters they had to introduce to the unfamiliar mass audience.
X-Men 2 was magnificent, they got Nightcrawler right, Wolverine going berserk during the school assault brought a tear of pure joy to my eye, and the hint of the Phoenix Effect coming up from under the water during the epilogue got me so excited I couldn’t speak.
X-Men 3 made me want to punch Singer in the throat, because I still believe that his jump to Superman Returns messed up both movies.
X-Men: First Class restored my faith in what they can do with X-Men, and I mostly forgave Singer for X3 at that point.
They have had to muddle a little bit with the story lines, but I don’t consider that a bad thing because they got the characters right (save Cyclops; I don’t know what they were thinking with that casting move), and some of the events in the storylines they were covering needed to be fixed anyway.
I seem to remember a lot of fans being upset at some of the stuff Claremont “retconned” into either non-existence or just plain nonsense, and how much of that they attempted to fix again later, so my inner fangirl isn’t upset at all to see a lot of those storylines updated via the movies into something that makes more sense than they did in the original comics.
Days of Future Past in the comic isn’t a perfect story, and for me, I didn’t love it because of the story that was told, I loved it because it showed a future where the X-Men had already failed, then when given a chance to prevent that future, in preventing it they may actually have made things worse. It was the ultimate “best intentions gone horribly wrong” scenario, and the surprise twist of that realization for me as the reader at the time was a delicious and horrifying shock.
There was also the fascination with that future timeline, how they got there and what they were doing, if anything, to change things for the better again.
So I’m good with them changing elements of Days, I just think that the paradox of having a grown up Kitty, who’d seen so much death (not just of her friends and family, but of her entire world), being transported psychically back into her teenaged self with a determination to convince everyone what’s happened and what event they think has to be averted to prevent it, is an element that would diminsh the story if it were removed.
But that could just be me.
For better or worse I doubt that the movie will feature the time travelling kids from the future. It would be interesting but I think we will see some serious character substitution and changes for the movie.
As long as Nightwing and Starfire are in it, I’m good. . .
You made me do a double-take there, Skiz, but I do seem to remember a one-shot comic that was a DC/Marvel crossover featuring Teen Titans and either X-Factor or the X-Men… Phoenix and I think Darkseid were in it, too.
Yep, it was X-Men and Teen Titans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny_X-Men_and_The_New_Teen_Titans
Yeah I was teasing. I do remember Nightwing or I guess it was Robin and Cyclops shaking hands in the crossover. Someone I know had it.
But seriously, if I were going to do a sequel to First class and have a Days of Future past type story line, then I would set it in the 70s and make Professor X the one who time traveled and make the present the future and get Patrick Stewart to play future/present professor-X. That sounds ambitious! If they are trying to pretend continuity with the other X-men movies then K. Pryde. That is IF they are making it an X-men first class sequel. If they are just picking up continuity with the other X-movies the they can bring back Ellen Page. Or just make it a complete reboot and do whatever they want.
oops i meant to say K. Pryde wasn’t born yet.
I was actually mildly surprised that they didn’t go with a New Mutants focused movie after First Class… sort of jump back to after the events of X3, then save a First Class sequel for later.
I’d have to do some research, but there are a bunch of other stories in the X-Men timeline between the events of First Class and Days of Future Past that I would have considered doing first. I’m trying to figure the angle on why do that story now, other than trying to create several branches of X-Men movies that they can do more than one X-Men movie a year in more than one timeline. That might make the fankids geeky happy, but confuse the hell outta the folks who don’t or have never followed the comics.