Director Jeff Wadlow talks more about his “edgier” take on X-Force

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Bleeding Cool caught up with director Jeff Wadlow, doing press for KICK-ASS 2, and gleaned some info regarding his next film, which is an adaptation of X-FORCE, one of the many spinoff comic books of X-MEN. Featuring a rotating roster of characters who have included Cable, Domino, Deadpool, Wolverine, Archangel, Warpath, and others, the adaptation will serve as the first "team" spinoff from the movies and Wadlow has a very distinct vision for what he wants to do.

Here are his thoughts:

I’m very deep into it. I can’t really say much as Fox has asked me not to but, again, it’s not a reboot or reimagining of the X cinematic universe. Tonally it will fit in, quite well with all the other movies… but then I think the other movies cover a wide range of tones. It’s certainly not going to be tonally similar to Kick-Ass.

I hope it will have what fans of X-Force will expect. I think it will be a little edgier, I think you’ll see some characters with different takes on what it means to be a mutant. There will be some grey areas that the movies haven’t yet been explored. It won’t be as “overt.” This movie is more about the grey areas in between.

I’m going to take some big ideas from the X-universe and flip them, I think in an interesting way. It’s hard to talk about that, though, without being specific. I probably shouldn’t have even talked about that at all because I can’t get into the specifics but I will say it’s similar to Kick-Ass 2 in that it wasn’t an open assignment, it wasn’t “We’re going to make an X-Force movie, who’s interested? Here’s what the movie’s going to be.”

When Mark [Millar] got the job with Fox I said “The first movie you guys should make is an X-Force movie and here’s how you should do it.” And that got him excited, and that got the studio excited and that’s the movie I’m writing.

Sounds pretty cool to me. I experienced X-FORCE at its first incarnation and have followed it off and on throughout the years and found it to be a much darker, more violent X-series, which was a fun departure from the melodrama that typically seeps out of the pages of the regular books. There's a huge desire to see both Cable and Deadpool brought to the big screen and this could be the perfect "testing waters" for the latter, who they've been trying to get on the big screen in a solo venture for years. Could this be the one to open those doors?

Wadlow's KICK-ASS 2 opens on August 16, 2013.