Press releases? Bryan Singer don’t need no stinking press releases. Having already tipped off the world to the fact that Hugh Jackman will be bringing his claws back to the main X-Men fold for** Days Of Future Past**, the director has now tweeted that Anna Paquin, Shawn Ashmore and Ellen Page will all be on duty for the First Class sequel.
Paquin played Rogue through the first three X-Men movies, helping to lead the audience into the world of the mutants in the first and flourishing into a full member of the team by** The Last Stand**.
Ashmore was also present from the off, playing Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, whose frost-creating character fell hard for Rogue. Their relationship continued even though her power/life-draining abilities meant physical contact was problematic at best.
Page was a late arrival compared to those two, taking over the role of Kitty Pryde (Shadowcat) for X-Men: The Last Stand after Katie Stuart played the character briefly in **X2 **and Sumela Kay briefly cameoed in X-Men.
The Pryde character has a major arc in the Days Of Future Past comic book, so it makes sense she’ll show up in the movie alongside Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellen’s Magneto. In the book, she's the one whose astrally--projected future self takes over her body in the past to warn the X-Men of the coming danger and alter the future - but since she's too young to exist in the First Class universe we're guessing that someone else (Professor X?) will take that job here.
Since there’s time travel involved, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy will be back as the younger Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr alongside Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Beast.
Singer, working from a script by Simon Kinberg, is set to kick off shooting soon to meet a July 18, 2014 release date.