While Marvel basks in the success of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, director Jake Schreier—the guiding hand behind Marvel’s earlier 2025 hit, Thunderbolts—is looking ahead to the studio’s most anticipated movie that doesn’t have the word “Avengers” in the title. Schreier is helming the movie designed to bring the X-Men fully into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, on the heels of Deadpool & Wolverine. As you’d expect, he’s giving his approach to the oft-adapted characters a lot of thought.
Speaking to the Playlist (and keeping things in Marvel-approved non-spoilery terms), Schreier said that his movie’s take on the X-Men will be quite different than what fans have seen before. Of course, he couldn’t elaborate more on that, but his comments suggest the departure will come not with the movie’s aesthetics but with a new approach to the emotional arcs of its famously conflicted mutants.
“To be able to explore all of the ideas that are inherent to that rich source material, but also at the scale inherent to the source material, that’s like a very rare and fortunate opportunity. That’s very exciting.”
Schreier also called the project “an incredible opportunity with super interesting characters and [much] internal conflict. These characters are wrestling with their identity and place in the world—that’s inherently interesting and complex material.”
In the same Playlist piece, Marvel boss Kevin Feige was quoted as calling Schreier’s X-Men a “youth-focused reboot” in terms of both casting and “tone and perspective.”
Details about the new X-Men movie are understandably scarce at the moment; it does not have a release date set, though the MCU has its trajectory mapped out through 2026 (Spider-Man: Brand New Day; Avengers: Doomsday) and 2027 (Avengers: Secret Wars). Characters from the Fox X-Men movies, released prior to Marvel parent company Disney’s acquisition of the characters in 2019, are expected to appear in those two Avengers films, with Schreier’s reboot coming after.
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