Lauren Shuler Donner on Future X-Men Movies

[Diesel]

If there’s any way a text blog post could be said to be ‘coming live’ then this one is, and from the Fox Blu-Ray press event in Beverly Hills. So far this morning we’ve been treated to a host of presentations centred around the release of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine Blu-Ray, out now in the US, hitting my native UK on October 19th.

First up was Lauren Shuler Donner, X-producer responsible for all of the mutant movies so far, and by the sounds of things, plenty more to come. Though she wasn’t able to stay for a series of extended interviews, she did take some questions from the floor, including mine. The answer is coming up after the break - clarifying just what is going on with X-Men: First Class at the moment, not to mention the Deadpool movie and a couple of other, less expected mutant pictures.

I couched the question as being about legacy casting as Gavin Hood inherited Hugh Jackman as Wolverine from Bryan Singer (and, I suppose, Brett Ratner), and in the cast roster for Wolverine we find not only Ryan Reynolds, now expected to appear in his own Deadpool spin-off movie, and a whole helicopter full of young mutants last seen seemingly soaring off to make up Xavier’s First Class.

Shuler Donner took this as an opportunity to address ‘Pocockgate’. The actor Tim Pocock, who played the young Cyclops in Wolverine, posted a tweet last week that announced:

Since then, he’s requested that everybody run a retraction:

According to Shuler Donner, there’s no truth to the initial claim at all. She announced that the film has no scheduled start date and will definitely not be kicking off in February. What’s more, she confirmed that no actors have signed contracts to appear in the film.

I asked if they had signed the young mutants up for an option on future films, and she admitted that yes, everybody was under option. No surprises there.

As well as the eventual New Class, then - whenever that might be - Shuler Donner revealed that she has been cooking up plans for several other mutant films. The two she named? An X4, reuniting the X-Men and a big screen outing for The New Mutants. X4, she said, had yet to be pitched to the studio, however.

I’m here for another day at least, and there’s a lot more coverage to come - and not only of X-Movies but of Baz Luhrmann’s Red Curtain movies and David Fincher’s rejigged new version of Fight Club all of them in their cutting-edge HD Blu-Ray presentation. As for breaking news, I’ll do my best to post it as fast as I can. We’ll show those big paper-based magazines and their ‘extended interviews’ what we can do, eh?

Stay tuned.