Out doing the rounds for the X-Men: Days Of Future Past Blu-ray publicity effort, screenwriter Simon Kinberg has let slip a few details about its immediate follow-up, **X-Men: Apocalypse. Describing it as the third of a trilogy, he's suggested that it's a film that will in some ways belong to Jennifer Lawrence's blue-skinned shapeshifter Mystique.
The argument goes that First Class was Magneto's film and DOFP was Xavier's. After years on screen as little more than a henchwoman, the recent films have promoted Mystique to essentially the third member of a triumvirate, and it's a seam Kinberg is keen to keep mining.
"Part of what’s really interesting about Mystique’s character is that she is, in some ways, the child of both Erik and Charles," he explains. "She grew up with Charles and then she sort of became a woman with Erik, so her being the cross-pollination, if you will, of those two philosophies and those two men is something we can explore in the movie too.”
He also says he wants to significantly increase the focus on her relationship with Beast, not having had the space in DOFP.
Of the trilogy business, Kinberg says that Apocalypse will mark "the completion of an arc" for the current X-Men roster. "That isn't to say we won't see them in future movies," he's quick to clarify. "Hopefully we will."
But with the series now, remarkably, approaching its 15th anniversary, and getting so tortuous continuity-wise that DOFP mounted a surprisingly extensive ret-con, is it beyond the realm of possibility that we'll see a full-on reboot once the current trilogy (plus Wolverine's third solo outing) is done with?
That's getting ahead of ourselves. In the meantime, Kinberg promises that Apocalypse will be "radical" and says he and director Bryan Singer are "having a lot of fun with the idea of the 1980s..."
For more on** X-Men: Apocalypse**, have a look at our musings here. Or if you'd rather just wait for the movie, it's released on May 19, 2016. Days Of Future Past is out in the UK on Blu-ray and DVD on November 10.