by Kim Filchak, Reporter

Warning, there are spoilers in this story. Read at your own risk.

With X-Men: Days of Future Past hitting the screens this week and getting some pretty good reviews, as well as looking to make a ton of money, is it too soon to start pre-gaming speculation on it’s sequel X-Men: Apocalypse? Nah, I didn’t think so either. Writer and  producer Simon Kinberg talked to The Movie Pilot and had some interesting things to say about X-Men: Apocalypse and it’s titular Big Bad.

“What the comics do best and I think Bryan’s done so well with these movies is humanizing, dramatizing the characters. It’s really been about how do we give him [Apocalypse], most importantly, a very human and relatable motivation so that as extreme and insane as his methods are, there is something, you know, understandable, almost empathetic about his motivation. Some of that is in the books, some of that is us building on that. You know, fully dimensionalizing the character, but it is a huge part of the task of adapting the story of Apocalypse. It is making him, while larger than life also dow to a human, emotional scale.”

This is encouraging to hear. Next to Magneto, Apocalypse is one of the most iconic of X-Men villains. He responsible for many of the trials and tragedies that make the story of the X-Men so compelling. The transition of Angel to Archangel and back again was one of my favorite pieces of character development when I was reading “X-factor” back in the day. That said there is room for concern since as good a job as Kinberg has done with X-Men Days of Future Past, he is still also one of the people responsible for X-Men: Last Stand which is considered by many the point where the franchise well and truly went off of the rails. However Kinberg’s further comments are reassuring, as he talks about all of the perpetration and research he did for the up coming sequel his obvious enthusiasm for the source materiel is very evident.

“I had read Age of Apocalypse and most of the appearances of Apocalypse before thinking about the movie, but went back and reread it and I think one of the things that’s most exciting about it is the potential for the visual scale of the movie, and so it is a larger story than even Days of Future Past. In Days of Future Past, they’re trying to stop something that’s not extinction level in the moment, although it could be one day. There’s not an immediacy in the plot and this is a plot that actually has extinction level stakes and is even more global than anything we’ve ever seen before. There’s a lot of architecture from the stories that we’ll be using. It will be about his character emotionally, you know, like who is he? Not just as a mutant, but as a person.”

He also went on to talk about the similarity’s and the differences that will distinguish X-Men: Apocalypse from X-Men: Days of Future Past on a storytelling level.

“The Apocalypse story has a lot of different ways of telling stories. That was one of the things that I liked about Days of Future Past: Doing a time travel movie where it’s not just sending someone back in time, but actually inter-cutting between the past and the future that we really haven’t seen in a movie before. Usually you have somebody go back and stay in the past the whole movie. Apocalypse has some, without getting into detail, as you know from the books, has some innovative, different ways of storytelling also.”

Kinberg also as a few things to say about the role of Gambit and in passing also seems to confirm that Channing Tatum has the part, though Tatum himself cast some doubt on that earlier today.

“I think Gambit’s one of the coolest characters that hasn’t been heavily featured. I mean, he was in the first Wolverine movie, but he hasn’t really been heavily featured in the main X-Men movies. I think Channing will be amazing playing him. What I like about the character is that my favorite characters in the comics are anti-heroes like Batman, like Wolverine, like Iron Man. I think Gambit fits into that classification because he’s a thief, he’s rogue, he’s a little destructive. I think he’s one of the more dynamic characters in the X-Men world. He’s certainly one as a fan that could be explored more.” 

So there you have it from the writer himself, some prime speculation material to occupy us until they release more details about the up coming film. X-Men: Apocalypse will open on May 27, 2016 and at the moment stars Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Jennifer Lawrence, with Bryan Singer producing and maybe directing.

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