Liev Schreiber is in negotiations to play the villain in the upcoming Wolverine movie. If ink is eventually put to paper, Schreiber would play William Stryker, the character played by Brian Cox in X-Men 2.
In X-Men lore, Stryker is a fanatic dedicated to wiping out mutants, after his own son turns out to be a mutant, and is involved in the Weapon X project that created Wolverine's adamantium skeleton.
The movie previously known as Wolverine, which will be directed by Gavin Hood and star Hugh Jackman, has also set a US release date of May 1, 2009 and changed its title. It'll now be known by the rather unwieldy title X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The film will start shooting this year in Australia, New Zealand and New Orleans.
Further mutants are yet to be cast, but will include some we've already seen in "one or more" of the three X-Men films. Those mutants will certainly include Sabertooth, since his alter-ego Victor Creed is a big part of the plot, and could include any number of other bad-guy mutants (Toad, Mystique, Calypso, Lady Deathstrike, Jason Stryker) and possibly Professor Xavier, but shouldn't, logically, include any other X-Men, since they clearly met our hero for the first time at the beginning fo the first movie.
Schreiber would seem a very solid choice to us. Teamed with the choice of Hood as director, this film is seeming more and more like an interesting movie that's trying for something original than a quick cash-in. What do you think of the casting? And does this X-Men Origins prefix mean this is going to be a franchise of prequels for all the X-Men, not just Wolverine and Magneto?