Marvel Studios To Start Taking Pitches for X-Men Film This Fall
Hollywood writers are now back to work, and the trades finally have started to unload a lot of scoops they’ve been holding on for the past few months. Whether this is an old one or one that popped up in their feed this past week, we don’t know, but it’s definitely a doozy. According to Deadline, Marvel Studios is already looking at their X-Men future… in live-action.
The film is still very far down the line for the studio, and it’s very unclear where it would land. In fact, Deadline is told that Marvel is in no rush to find the right candidate, and a decision will likely not be made until early 2024. Regardless, it’s at least interesting that with at least four more years of content before Avengers: Secret Wars comes out, the studio is already hearing pitches for X-Men. It’s been widely assumed that, despite a few references here and there, the Marvel Cinematic Universe won’t be getting their hands dirty with an actual mutant-centric story until the conclusion of the Multiverse Saga.
There’s a lot of uncertainty here, of course. 2022 included the first mention of the “mutant” word, and twice, in Ms. Marvel and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. We expect more characters and projects to follow suit sooner rather than later, but the franchise already has a lot going on storywise and also production-wise — their output as of late has been underwhelming, to say the least. And as the storyline continues to move forward, with more and more titles added every year, it’s been widely suspected that come Secret Wars, which will conclude the current arc, the continuity will be rebooted. Nobody from Marvel has said anything to that extent, of course, but by that point, the number of hours necessary to be fully caught up will run in the hundreds.
So where do the X-Men fall? If Marvel won’t be hiring any writer for the X-Men film before the top of 2024, we surely won’t be seeing such a film before the end of 2026. As they rethink their entire schedule for the Multiverse Saga, I suspect that they will move Avengers: The Kang Dynasty another year, at least, to debut in 2027 — following the domino effect, Secret Wars would move to 2028. That’s at the earliest — think that we’re already one year behind the planning Kevin Feige announced back in July 2022, as Ironheart was supposed to debut this fall and Agatha: Darkhold Diaries, or whatever name it has these days, will now come out next fall as opposed to this winter. And that isn’t even because of the labor stoppages, as both of those projects were in post-production by the time the actors went on strike.
For now, the next time we’ll be seeing a mutant will be in this November’s The Marvels. The reboot/sequel to the X-Men animated series from the 90s, X-Men ’97, moved from a late 2023 spot to an early 2024 release on Disney Plus; a second season is already in the works. Next year’s Deadpool 3, which is currently dated for May 3, although it’s highly unlikely that date will stick due to the three-month SAG-AFTRA strike that pressed pause on production, will also include mutant characters — going no further, Wolverine himself is co-lead of the film, and it’s all but confirmed by now that plenty of familiar faces from the 20th Century Fox Marvel era will be popping up. We might have a better idea of what’s going on with the X-Men after that film, whenever it comes out.
Next up for Marvel is Loki season 2 on October 5, and The Marvels on November 10.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
