For years now, Marvel Studios has been working in the background setting the stage for the X-Men to arrive. Ever since Disney acquired Fox, wheels h
For years now, Marvel Studios has been working in the background setting the stage for the X-Men to arrive. Ever since Disney acquired Fox, wheels have been in motion for the mutants to change the DNA of the MCU – and while little has been publicly announced, we do know one all-important detail: the man in charge of directing the eventual MCU X-Men film is Jake Schreier, the filmmaker who recently brought us Marvel’s Thunderbolts* (aka, the New Avengers).
As he tells Empire, Schreier is starting to get the wheels spinning on his X-adventure. “I can’t say anything about it, but we’ve started work on X-Men, and that’s obviously very, very exciting,” he confirms. And with Thunderbolts* being a team-up story, there’s much he’s learned about making an ensemble Marvel movie. “There are so many things that I didn’t know about before I started [Thunderbolts*],” he says, pointing to the MCU experience he can now draw from. “The biggest learning curve for me was the proportion of the action to the more emotional, character-driven scenes, and how, even though it’s more shooting days than I’ve ever had, they get eaten up quite quickly by the action stuff. By the time we got to the end of it, it felt like, ‘Oh, now I feel like we get how to do this a little bit better.’”
Those epic set-pieces though, sure to continue in Schreier’s next outing, are a major highlight of making a Marvel movie. “Look, who gets to do that?” he says. “[On Thunderbolts*] we’re in the middle of nowhere in Utah, in a gorgeous location, owning a road, and filming in 100-degree heat, or finding yourself on the second-tallest building in the world. These are very special experiences.” Fingers crossed the director can make something x-cellent with those mutants.
Read Empire’s full interview with Jake Schreier, looking back on Thunderbolts*, in The Running Man issue, on sale Thursday 28 August. Pre-order a copy online here. Thunderbolts* is out now on digital, DVD, Blu-ray and 4K, and comes to Disney+ on 27 August.
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