Let Me X-plain

X-Men movie producer Lauren Shuler Donner updates Empire on the current state of the franchise.



Writer Christopher McQuarrie will pen X-Men Origins: Wolverine 2 which is "the furthest along of all the X-Men projects on the boil".

"We're very fortunate to have a story mostly outlined for us and we wanted an A+ writer, so we want to Chris McQuarrie. He came in and has tightened the story and got really immersed in the whole thing - he's in Japan in his head" says Donner.

She's of course referring to the 1982 four-issue comic book mini-series-written by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller set in Japan and deals with Logan's relationship with Mariko Yashida, the daughter of a crime lord.

Donner says for authenticity sake "it's very likely we'll be shooting in Japan" and while the characters will likely "speak English rather than Japanese with subtitles", they hope to be very accurate in their portrayal of Japanese culture.

There's three more X spin-offs in the pipeline, Deadpool, X-Men Origins: Magneto and X-Men: First Class all are quite a ways off though...

Deadpool:

"It's the hardest story to tell, I think," Shuler Donner told the site. "There's no clear-cut villain." Shuler Donner says they are "figuring out which [stories] to incorporate" while searching for a screenwriter.

Magneto

"David Goyer has written a brilliant script. It starts in the concentration camps and has Magneto coming out of there,"

And then the bad news:. "But you know, I'm not sure that film is going to be made. The studio has a wealth of potential stories, and they have to stand back and decide which ones to make. And Magneto, I think, is at the back of the queue."

She didn't completely rule out the pic being made in the future, saying "Maybe it'll get made in five years - who knows? "

First Class:

"We want it to be like the recent, darker Harry Potter - The Official Site [films]. It should not be a kiddie movie—we're in the X-Men world so you can't suddenly change the tone," she said.

"The First Class comics are funnier than any other comics I've read. Basically in each one the kids are fighting strange villains, sometimes it's aliens, sometimes it's monsters. I want to get a flavor of that world. There's also still an element of friction between the mutants and the outside world. Remember that this will be set way back before anyone knew mutants existed."