Slowly, but surely, Marvel’s making moves to bring the X-Men to the big screen again in the next few years. As everyone waits to find out what all that entails (and who it’ll involve), filmmaker Tim Miller looked back on the one he nearly did once upon a time.
During a recent interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the Deadpool director talked about Marvel’s mutant corner as the company’s “secret weapon. […] The X-Men are my favorite characters, and I wrote to Kevin Feige like, ‘If there was anything you’d ever let me do in the Marvel universe, the X-Men would be it.’” In fact, he had an X-film in development at one point, which would’ve been based on Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Uncanny X-Men #143. In that, the team departs the mansion for the holidays, leaving Kitty Pryde on her own. While left to her own devices, an N’Garai—demons the team previously fought over the years—invades the mansion, and she’s got to hold her own against it.
Miller described the film as “Home Alone meets Alien,” and it seems this was the Kitty solo movie Fox announced back in 2018 that he would’ve directed from a script by comics scribe Brian Michael Bendis. (At the time, Kitty was part of the Guardians of the Galaxy as Star-Lord during Bendis and Valerio Schiti’s 2015-2017 run). Unfortunately, this was in development at Fox around the time of its merger with Disney, so it was one of many ideas—along with publicized solo films for Gambit and Multiple Man, plus a hopeful Fantastic Four crossover—which never came to cinematic fruition.
X-Men movies were typically action affairs, but Fox let the characters dip into horror with New Mutants. It was the last franchise movie of the Fox era, but once they’ve properly settled into the MCU, maybe they can be taken for a scary spin again. Either way, Miller seems to be happy with how everything’s settled: he called himself “the luckiest nerd on the planet” for bringing a proper Deadpool to the silver screen, and feels things have gone up from there. “I didn’t expect to have my own studio, or to do Terminator: Dark Fate,” he told THR. “Being able to do Love Death + Robots is probably my achievement I’m most of. I’m old, but I’m not done yet.”
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