Zak Penn talks Young X-Men Spin-Off
Zak Penn gets a lot of credit for being one of the writers on Bryan Singer’s X2, which many consider to be one of the best comic book adaptations of all time. But truth be told, he’s written a lot of crap, including the Elektra movie and X-Men: The Last Stand. But people seem to have their blinders up, and all they see is his X2 credit. But I still remember that he was responsible for Last Action Hero.
After Bryan Singer dropped out from directing X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox was in discussions with Penn about helming the project. The studio eventually went to an even worse director (Brett Ratner) with a bigger resume. Penn reveals to Cinematical that he had since been contracted to work on an young X-Men spin-off.
“I had been attached to direct one of the [X-Men] spin-offs; in fact, I’m in discussions about that now,” said Penn. “The original idea was to have me do a young X-Men spin-off, a spin-off of the young X-Men characters. But someone came up with a pretty interesting idea which I can’t discuss. I was pretty taken by it, as was the studio. I have to give him credit, it was this guy who worked with me named Mike Chamoy — he worked a lot with me on X3. He came up with how to do a young X-Men movie which is not what you’d expect.”
When can we expect this young X-Men flick?
“We’ll see; I still have to talk to Fox, set the story down … and then it will take a year — maybe two years — to get together. Put it this way, if you agree to do one of the X-Men movies, it could end up happening four or five years down the line.”
It would obviously be very difficult to make another X-Men film with the original characters, due to actor contract costs. A young X-Men concept might be the only way to go, but what kind of spin could Penn and Chamoy put on that story? And would the resulting film be better than Elektra? We hope so.
Beast In Magneto Movie?
I thought the Magneto movie was dead. We haven’t heard anything about it in a long while, and director David Goyer is busy working on other movies. However, we now have a development which comes from Latino Review:
While on a visit today to the creature effects shop for Hellboy II: The Golden Army I noticed some pictures that were lying around for other movies like Land of the Lost and of course, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
But I also noticed a photograph of a young looking Beast leaping through the air. Not a drawing, although it could have been computer generated, but an actual photo.
“What’s this?”
“This is young Beast from the prequel they’re gonna be doing. Magneto.”
“Oh, ok.” I replied, trying to act calm before my head exploded from seeing this picture. “So Beast is in Magneto, huh?”
“Ya.”
The picture showed a younger guy in the Beast getup leaping down. He was in the full blue costume with his long tail and you couldn’t mistake him for anything other than Beast. The picture also had ‘Magneto’ written in the upper corner. Like I said, I was only able to see it for a few seconds, but it did not look like a computer rendered picture, it looked like an actor in full makeup. Nevertheless, Beast IS in the movie.
This is certainly interesting. However, since when did Beast have a tail? It could be Night crawler, as they are both blue and sometimes people get confused. It seems FOX are making use of the X-Men characters that they have rights to. We have Gambit, Blob and a whole truck loads of characters in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so I don’t see why Magneto cant get his fair share of X-Men characters. Plus Beast is a great character.
Gossip Girl And OC Writer Josh Schwartz Work On X-Men Script?
Well this news is a bit random and out of the blue. Black Book Magazine sat down with Josh Schwartz to speak to him about The OC, Gossip Girl and Chuck. Nothing really interesting there. Fairly average interview. That is until we get to this:
Something he can talk about, however, is news that he will pen the screenplay for the next installment of X-Men, a prequel of sorts. “I’m very well aware that I’ll be bludgeoned by purists, but I love its mythology, and it comes with a pretty hefty paycheck.” Of the project, he beams with excitement about the opportunity to involve lesser known X-Men characters who haven’t yet been portrayed on film. It will center on teenage characters at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning. “It’s not like I’m adding new characters like Toaster Head, or anything like that.” Despite his enthusiam, he’s cautious, given the double-edged sword inherent in the seemingly inexhaustible renaissance of the genre. “The Hulk looks like it’s going to be terrible. And why does he look like he’s fighting against the monster from Cloverfield? I mean, with Transformers, it’s not like fans were going to come back saying, ‘You used the wrong car.’ This, however, is a different story. Of his predecessors and their successes (or failures), he says, “Brett Ratner didn’t have a lot of credibility going in to the third X-Men movie, but I think Bryan Singer [who directed the first two installments] got a free pass on Superman Returns because of his work on X-Men.”
Wow! We have heard X-Men 3 writer Zak Penn talk about writing a young X-Men movie, but that all depends on the outcome of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It seems FOX have thought that the original cast were getting a bit expensive, as were the production costs. The best thing to do business-wise was to wait a few years, and then relaunch a new trilogy or set of movies featuring younger and less expensive actors. The fact that is has X-Men in the name will ensure that it is a box office favourite, as long as they do things right.
Now Marvel are making their own movies and not selling anymore of their characters, it seems studios like FOX are going to milk the comic book franchises they have already got. The Fantastic Four franchise is pretty much dead, so X-Men is really the only franchise that can benefit FOX.
Is going the OC and Gossip Girl route the right way for the X-Men franchise? Will it turn into a trilogy of teen problems, or do you think Josh Schwartz has something up his sleeve?