Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of all four X-Men movies, as well as the likes of “Hotel for Dogs” and “Constantine,” sat down with Empire a few days back, plugging the Blu-Ray release of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” for people who like their shitty, moronic movies in glorious 1080p. She talked in a surprising level of detail, and candidness, about future projects in the franchise, pretty much throwing Fox executives, studio head Tom Rothman in particular, under the bus in the process.
– We guessed as much a few days back, but Donner seems to have more-or-less given up on “X-Men Origins: Magneto,” despite praising David Goyer’s script. She cites the difficulty of finding a younger actor to fill in for Ian McKellen, saying that “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.” We’re pretty happy about this — the opening scene of “X-Men” was bold, and set the tone for the rest of Bryan Singer’s vision for the series, but we don’t really want to see a whole superhero movie that hijacks the Holocaust as a backdrop, and the whole project has a whiff of “Hannibal Rising” about it.
– Signing up to play “Green Lantern” doesn’t seem to have ruled Ryan Reynolds out of continuing the title role in “Deadpool. ” Donner draws a comparison to Harrison Ford: “He was in “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” at the same time and everyone was fine with that.” She also signals a fresh start for the character — “I want to ignore the version of Deadpool that we saw in “Wolverine” and just start over again. Reboot it. because this guy talks, obviously, and to muzzle him would be insane.” We can’t quite believe that people care about the continuation of a character with 4 minutes of screen time in a terrible film, but there we go…
– Josh Schwartz (the creator of “The O.C.”, “Gossip Girl” and “Chuck,” is making his movie debut with the script for “X-Men: First Class,” a sort of “Muppet Babies” for oppressed superheroes, taking the characters from the original movie, and showing their adolescent years. Donner tells Empire “Harry Potter is a bit of a role model for us, absolutely. But we want it to be like the recent, darker Potters. It should not be a kiddie movie — we’re in the X-Men world so you can’t suddenly change the tone. The First Class comics are really fun — they’re 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.”
– It sounds like the movie furthest along is the sequel to “Wolverine,” being written by actually-talented screenwriter Chris McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”). Again, the producer doesn’t have particularly kind words for her bosses at 20th Century Fox, saying that, for the sequel: “It’s actually the story we wanted to use for the first Wolverine film, but Tom Rothman preferred to set the character up with an origin story first.” Did Donner not stand up to Rothman at any point in the production of “Wolverine?” The movie will be set in Japan, and “focus on the relationship between Wolverine and Mariko, the daughter of a Japanese crime lord, and what happens to him in Japan.”
The X-Men universe is undeniably a rich one, and “X2: X-Men United” proved that it can be the basis of exhilarating, intelligent blockbusters, but how many of those do we have? Just the one in this universe. It just seems at this point like Fox are continuing the franchise purely to stop the rights reverting to Marvel, rather than because they have stories to tell — the big budget version of Roger Corman’s “Fantastic Four.”