Mystique in line for X-Men spin off, Divergent sequel splits into two and Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur raises flag in 2016

Jennifer Lawrence is undoubtedly the most popular actress of the moment; she’s won a Leading Actress Oscar and has a further two Academy Award nominations for Silver Linings Playbook, Winter’s Bone and American Hustle and has the iconic lead role of Katniss Everdeen in blockbuster franchise The Hunger Games at the age of 24. She’s also a major character (hero or villain we’ll discover soon) in the X-Men franchise where she plays the shapeshifting mutant Mystique. Fox seem to be riding on Lawrence’s success however: they’ve dramatically bumped up her rank in the promotion for this May’s X-Men sequel Days of Future Past (which marks Bryan Singer’s return to the series) and they’ve taken that one step further.

Producer Lauren Shuler Donner has let slip that Raven could be one her way to a solo movie. The mutant spin-off isn’t an unheard of occurrence. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has received two already, X-Men: Origins Wolverine and The Wolverine, and for a while standalone adventures for Gambit (Channing Tatum) and Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) have been in production, with the latter’s Tim Miller determined to bring the fan favourite to the big screen. Meanwhile Singer’s Apocalypse, James Mangold’s next Wolverine and Jeff Wadlow’s X-Force (chronicling the story of time traveller Cable) will be Fox’s priority so we may have to wait a fair while till we get to see Mystique: The Movie.

British writer director Guy Ritchie is probably more associated with his hardcore crime/comedy/thrillers Snatch, Rocknrolla, Revolver and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, as well as Madonna rom-com Swept Away but let’s not go there. More recently, he’s become better known for his surprising critical and commercial success with cracking detective adventure Sherlock Holmes and its sequel A Game of Shadows. We’re still begging for Holmes 3 (hopefully starring Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Stephen Fry, Kelly Reilly and Eddie Marsan) but Ritchie is plowing through to other things with the reboot of 1960s comedy The Man from UNCLE as well as developing project King Arthur, which we haven’t heard anything about since January.

All we know so far is that, after the tanking of 2004’s Arthur and 1995’s First Knight, Ritchie is reinstating the fantasy elements of the story and could be planning as far ahead as six instalments. It’s now confirmed that Warner Bros have slotted Arthur into a July 2016 release, booking early to avoid conflict with the likes of Star Trek 3, Batman vs Superman, X-Men: Apocalypse, Captain America 3 and Avatar 2. You may remember that this version of the story was chosen by the studios, pushing aside David Dobkin’s plans involving Kit Harrington as the young king and Gary Oldman as the magician Merlin.

Divergent may have lost its “the new Hunger Games” potential but it has still done impressive box office numbers, seems to have charmed numerous critics (far more in the US than in the UK however) and is leaps and bounds ahead of The Mortal Instruments, Beautiful Creatures and The Host, other recent failed candidates of the genre. The production was confident enough to greenlight its sequel Insurgent although that’ll be directed by RED’s Robert Schwentke, taking over from Tomorrow When the War Began’s Neil Burger. We’ve got our first piece of news about the third instalment, and adaptation of last year’s novel from Veronica Roth, Allegiant.

It’s not overly surprising to discover that Lionsgate are pulling the same cheap money-extorting approach taken by Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games: they are splitting the final novel into two films. You may have picked up that we’re not fond of this strategy but we’d be more assured if the studios actually bothered to come up with a different name instead of a generic Parts One and Two, how about Hunger Games: Capitol or Harry Potter and the Lost Diadem. The Hobbit managed that three times with excellent success. The Divergent series will likely star Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Kate Winslet, Jai Courtney, Zoe Kravitz and Miles Teller.

King Arthur – July 22nd 2016

X-Men: Mystique – 2018?

Allegiant: Part One – March 18th 2016

Allegiant: Part Two – 2017

New X-Men Days of Future Past poster and Fox schedules sequels to Fantastic Four and Wolverine plus mystery Marvel project

Fox is overseeing the release of its tentpole X-Men sequel Days of Future Past but it’s going further to launch new Marvel projects into the future. Following DOFP is X-Men: Apocalypse (May 29th 2016), you can find more about that here, and then a reboot of The Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank, the man behind chilling superhero horror Chronicle, and was recently confirmed to be starring Michael B Jordan, Miles Teller, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell. The latter is over a year away from release but Fox are confident enough to put in a rudimentary July 2017 release date for a potential sequel.

But that’s not all; we can pencil in the return of Hugh Jackman and James Mangold for March of that year as well as a mystery superhero outing in 2018. We’ve no lead on this so we can timidly speculate these three options First, there’s X-Force, an potential spin off for Days of Future Past’s Bishop directed by Kick Ass 2 and Never Back Down’s Jeff Wadlow. The other obvious choice is Tim Miller and Ryan Reynolds’ oddball fantasy Deadpool. Perhaps it’s the long awaited Gambit spin off, starring Channing Tatum and produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, that we’ve heard so much about.

We finish today with another bit of exciting X-Men news. An awesome new poster has been launched. The time travelling thriller stars Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, Shawn Ashmore, Ellen Page, Lucas Till, Evan Peters, Anna Paquin, Booboo Stewart, Omar Sy, Adan Canto, Josh Helman, Fan Bingbing, Evan Jonigkeit, Daniel Cudmore and Halle Berry. It’s the biggest X-Men movie in terms of scale so far and will hopefully be the best.

X-Men: Days of Future Past – May 22nd

X-Men: Apocalypse – May 19th 2016

Deadpool – July 3rd 2018?

Gambit – July 3rd 2018?

X-Force – July 3rd 2018?

The Fantastic Four – June 18th 2014

The Fantastic Four 2 – June 14th 2017

The Wolverine 2 – March 3rd 2017

New casting for Pan, Colin Trevorrow speaks out on Jurassic World and news for Wolverine 2

For a movie titled Pan, you’d expect the titular hero to be on the top of the casting call but instead Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy, Inside Llewyn Davis) as the young Hook, Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables, X-Men) as Hook’s captain Blackbeard and Rooney Mara (The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) as Tiger Lily were appointed by director Joe Wright (Hanna, Anna Karenina) beforehand. However, now it’s confirmed that Levi Miller has won the role of Pan. Miller, so far in his career, has only had acting credits in the short films Great Adventures and Akiva as well as an appearance in one episode of short lived sci-fi show Terra Nova. Pan recently slipped into the 2015 release to fill the gap left by Man of Steel sequel Batman vs Superman so it’s not too long until we can see it on the screen.

Another hugely anticipated 2015 release is Jurassic World, a sequel from director Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed). Trevorrow has spoken out about how he hopes to nail this one, an achievement not accomplished by Jurassic Park III. “There are a hundred different ways to tell any story, finding the right one takes persistence. Jurassic Park movies don’t fit into a specific genre. They’re sci-fi adventures that also have to be funny, emotional and scary as hell. That takes a lot of construction, but it can’t feel designed. The characters have to be authentic, the situations real.”

Many stars have been cast so far but not the likes of Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, or Laura Dern, the original’s cast. “I respect those actors too much to shoehorn them into this story for my own sentimental reasons. Jurassic Park isn’t about the bad luck of three people who keep getting thrown into the same situation.” However, one star of the lesser stars of the original has just been added to the cast. “This hasn’t been announced yet, but BD Wong will be returning as Dr. Henry Wu. He had a much larger role in the original novel, he was the engineer of this breakthrough in de-extinction. He spent two decades living in Hammond’s shadow, underappreciated. We think there’s more to his story.”

About man-of-the-moment Chris Pratt’s (The Lego Movie, Parks and Recreation, Guardians of the Galaxy, Her) role, Trevorrow added “The character allows us to explore some new ideas about our relationship with these animals, without losing the humour and sense of adventure.” Other cast members include Bryce Dallas Howard (The Help), Nick Robinson (The Kings of Summer), Ty Simpkins (Iron Man 3, Insidious) and Vincent D’Onofrio (Men in Black).

Following this May’s Days of Future Past, the X-Men film series is continued with Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse (most likely starring James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender) and then the yet untitled follow up to last year’s The Wolverine. In a Twitter Q&A, Wolverine, Knight and Day, 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line’s James Mangold announced that his sequel would start shooting after Apocalypse. Hopefully, they can use this extra time to try and think of a way of injecting ferocity into this new instalment something evidently lacking in last year’s film.

The Wolverine 2 – 2017

Jurassic World – June 12th 2015

Pan – July 17th 2015

X-Men’s Bryan Singer confirms Apocalypse, The Rock’s Sand Andreas for 2015 and new director for The Fifth Beetle

Director Bryan Singer, after a couple of misfire action flicks, launched a career of brilliance with The Usual Suspects (ranked by IMDB as the 25th greatest film of all time) which led to a job on the first two X-Men films. They remain the best in the series as he left after that and neither Brett Ratner or Gavin Hood could pick up the pieces. A glimmer of light was shown in the Singer produced and Matthew Vaughn directed First Class and I guess James Mangold did the best he could with the stale The Wolverine. However, the series should be back to its full glory next year when Singer returns to directing the series, after going off to do the iffy Superman Returns and Jack the Giant Slayer as well as the brilliant Valkyrie, with Days of Future Past. But Singer could be here to stay.

He confirmed on twitter that X-Men: Apocalypse was to arrive in 2016. Besides the fact that it’ll feature the title characters the X-Men and Apocalypse, we can’t tell to much about the plot with our current knowledge. I not well versed in recent Marvel Comics runs but the internet’s main suggestion seems to be The Age of Apocalypse. We’re not sure how this’ll run with the new James Mangold/Hugh Jackman Wolverine film but Marvel Disney are having good success with two releases every year. Another project Apocalypse could tie into is Josh Trank’s 2015 reboot of The Fantastic Four who we presumed would be part of Singer’s “marvel mash-up” project.

We move onto San Andreas. As well as being a fault, it’s the new action disaster movie set to star Dwayne Johnson as a rescue helicopter pilot separated from his daughter as a huge earthquake strikes California. Journey 2 director Brad Peyton is currently set to direct but the 2014 scheduled film has had to slip into the ever changing, and busy, 2015 slot but I don’t think it’ll cope and make a great box office against the giants coming our way in two years time.

Another Peyton, this time a first name not a surname, is the subject of this article. It’s Peyton Reed, director of The Break-Up and Yes Man. His next project could be both biopic and Dark Horse comic book adaptation The Fifth Beetle. It’s the story of Brian Epstein, the man behind the decade defining band The Beetles who rose to international fame and legend while Epstein was left behind. The reason the film has taken so long to get out of development was because of the tricky business of claiming the rights to the songs but they’re going to have a even bigger task of casting the legendary members: John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.

X-Men: Days of Future Past – May 22nd 2014

X-Men: Apocalypse – 2016

The Wolverine 2 – 2016

The Fantastic Four – June 19th 2015

San Andreas – 2015

The Fifth Beetle – 2015

Singer Ed Sheeran confirmed for Hobbit 2 soundtrack, Jackman for more Wolverine and Ejiofor rumoured for Star Wars

There’s a fairly loose connection from 12 Years a Slave and Children of Men star Chiwetel Ejiofor and Super 8 director and Lost creator JJ Abrams. The BAFTA and Golden Globe nominee Ejiofor stars with Amanda Seyfried and Chris Pine in Z for Zachariah. Chris Pine stars as Captain Kirk in the Abrams directed Star Trek and Star Trek: Into Darkness. I doubt the two have actually met but Ejiofor is now one of those rumoured to be going in for Abrams next stellar project Star Wars: Episode VII.

Benedict Cumberbatch was part of this rumour chain but he was quick to deny any connection to the project. Daniel Day Lewis was mentioned at some point and it’s confirmed that Saorise Ronan and Sullivan Stapleton auditioned. That’s all along side the speculation about previous Star Wars actors returning, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Harrison Ford (Han Solo), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Kenny Baker (R2-D2), Warwick Davis (Warick Wicket III) and Samuel L Jackson (Mace Windu) could potentially reprise their roles from previous films but I’d prefer familiarity with setting and tone rather than characters. It’s rumoured that Ejiofor had a meeting but it’s hard to say who’ll be making the final cut. I must say, the last time Ejoifor starred with spaceships was the brilliant Joss Whedon sci-fi Serenity in which he too was excellent.

Ed Sheeran was one of Britain’s biggest pop/rock stars of the last couple of years. His album + took him to international fame with hits like Lego House, The A Team, Give Me Love and the Taylor Swift duet Everything Has Changed. He’s now confirmed over Twitter that providing the end credits song for fantasy sequel The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. This is the second part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings prequel trilogy. The 22 year old Sheeran, who’s writing and performing the song, is joining the list of Middle-Earth singers including Annie Lennox (Eurythmics), Neil Finn (Crowded House) and Enya.

Possibly the biggest news of the day is that our favourite mutant could be returning beyond next year’s Days of Future Past. Deadline reported that Hugh Jackman is likely to return as his iconic Marvel hero Wolverine for another instalment. Lauren Shuler Donner will produce and The Wolverine director James Mangold is set to write the production and I reckon he’ll end up directing too. Perhaps, this time they need a couple more X-Men (maybe Kitty, Rogue or Iceman) and The Wolverine’s Yukio (Rila Fukushima) and Mariko (Tao Okamoto).

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – December 13th

Star Wars: Episode VII – Christmas 2015

X-Men 8 – 2016?