Source: Empire

This is so great. All the latest X-Men news in one, four-page article! X-Men producer Lauren Shuler-Donner sat down with Empire and gave the latest on where they want to go with X-Men: First Class, Wolverine 2, Deadpool and Magneto.

Here’s a little of what she had to say about Wolverine 2:

“That’s the furthest along of all the X-Men projects on the boil. It’s actually the story we wanted to use for the first Wolverine film, but [Fox head honcho] Tom Rothman preferred to set the character up with an origin story first. This movie will really focus on the relationship between Wolverine and Mariko, the daughter of a Japanese crime lord, and what happens to him in Japan.”

“What’s cool about this part of the saga is that Wolverine will be fighting in a different style to what we’ve seen before. Mariko’s father has this stick-like weapon, so Wolverine will have to fight against that. There’ll be samurai, ninja, katana blades, different forms of martial arts — mano-a-mano, extreme fighting.”

As far as X-Men: First Class goes, apparently they don’t want to make a kiddie movie:

“Harry Potter is a bit of a role model for us, absolutely. But we want it to be like the recent, darker Potters. It should not be a kiddie movie – we’re in the X-Men world so you can’t suddenly change the tone. The First Class comics are really fun – they’re funnier than any other comics I’ve read. Basically in each one the kids are fighting strange villains, sometimes it’s aliens, sometimes it’s monsters. I want to get a flavour of that world.”

Read on to see her take on Ryan Reynolds playing both Deadpool and The Green Lantern as well as the status of the Magneto movie (good news for Deadpool, not so good for Magneto).

For the record, I actually somewhat disagree on her take on Reynolds playing two comic book characters. She brings up Harrison Ford playing both Han Solo and Indiana Jones as an example of how this could work. I am not opposed to the idea of Reynolds playing these two characters, but I think it is somewhat different that what Harrison Ford did in that Reynolds is playing two comic book characters.

To elaborate, Ford just simply played two completely different characters from two completely different genres, and one was a title character and one was not. They were different enough from each other. Deadpool and the Green Lantern, while they are different title characters, are still comic book title characters. They are both in the same sort of comic book genre. It is a much closer relation than Solo and Jones.

Anyhow, this was a great article. Definitely check it out.