Bryan Singer dishes details about X-Men: First Class!

There has been a whirlwind of casting announcements for the prequel X-MEN: FIRST CLASS lately — over a dozen major characters so far, giving some people unwelcome visions of other superhero movies that felt overpopulated.

Producer and X-franchise veteran Bryan Singer obviously caught a whiff of the online discontent, and rang AICN to clarify a few things. Some of the key (spoiler?) points disclosed:

-The movie is set in the 1960s. JFK is President.

-Charles Xavier will have hair and use of his legs (mostly).

-The Hellfire Club are the antogonists, with Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw, and January Jones as Emma Frost (which means they are indeed ignoring the character as established in WOLVERINE).

-Costumes will be more “comic bookish” than previous mutant movies.

-Vaughn is inspired by the James Bond type tech of the time (you may recall Vaughn was also once considering a feature based on 60s espionage show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”).

-No Cyclops or Jean Grey. But there are still MORE characters we haven’t heard about yet.

-The movie will have “a much more international feel than the prior X-MEN movies.”

Read all the details of the Singer conversation RIGHT HERE.

I will admit to being skeptical about this whole thing so far — after all, director Matthew Vaughn famously ditched on X-MEN 3 just two weeks before production (supposedly because he decided he didn’t want to move his family to LA, but probably more because it was looking like a rushed mess with too many characters and studio interference). Then he trash-talked Brett Ratner’s result, claiming he could have made something “a hundred times better” and “with far more emotion and heart”. And yet now he would appear to be in a similar situation, making an X-MEN movie (for the same studio not known for its quality control) that would seem to have too many characters, and is being hustled into production to make a June 2011 release date.

So the clarification from Singer is a bit encouraging. Fingers, claws and DNA strands crossed for something good.