Marvel Updates: ‘X-Men’ Movie Sets Writer, Vision Disney Plus Finds Showrunner
As Marvel Studios tries to turn the ship around with a new feature film this summer, and a spin-off of one of their most successful shows on Disney Plus this September, reports have started to circulate about the studio’s early development on future MCU projects.
On Monday, Deadline reported that Michael Lesslie is currently in negotiations to pen the script for their upcoming X-Men movie. His name had popped up as one of the final candidates in a story run by Jeff Sneider in his newsletter. Deadline added that the studio is high on the X-Men characters following the success of the animated X-Men ’97 series. The search for a director will be underway next.
Lesslie’s name is one of the hottest in town lately. He wrote last year’s Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and also wrote the upcoming Now You See Me 3. He’s also one of the finalists for the Harry Potter Max series, though if he’s going to spend the next few years tied up at Marvel Studios, he might have to take himself out of that race.
The X-Men franchise will see a small resurgence this summer thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine, but that is likely going to be a cap-off on the Fox-era characters. Marvel will likely want to move forward with a new set of characters and actors. No timeline for this movie has been established, but it’s going to take years before we get it in theaters. At least one Avengers movie will probably come first.
Elsewhere, on the Disney Plus side of things, Marvel is moving forward with that long-reported Vision series. Paul Bettany will reprise his role, and Star Trek: Picard executive producer Terry Matalas will serve as showrunner, Variety reported today. The series was originally named Vision Quest in the media reports, but Variety is now saying that it’s untitled. They did add, however, that Marvel is targeting a 2026 release date.
This series alone serves as a microcosm of how the Marvel machinery has slowed down over the past few years, as indicated over and over again by Disney CEO Bob Iger. It’d been reported back in October 2022 that Marvel was assembling a writers’ room, but it’s taken a while for them to find the best foot forward on the show. Be it because they were focused on other projects, or because they were waiting to see how it could fit inside the larger storyline, Variety is now saying this is a different project from the one that was in development with WandaVision‘s Jac Schaeffer.
No production timeline was provided, though there have been rumors for a while that Marvel wants to start filming this series in the fall. As Variety noted, this is Marvel’s first series pick-up in almost two years, and is also the first under Marvel’s new way of approaching their Disney Plus slate. They have now created the Marvel Television banner, and have started taking more time developing the series, as well as hiring writer-producers that can oversee the production as showrunners — overall following a more traditional TV approach.
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.
