News broke last week that Fox may be developing an X-FORCE movie to follow X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST as a new franchise to run concurrent with X-MEN. We also learned that KICK-ASS 2 director Jeff Wadlow may be the man writing and maybe directing the new super-squad film. What we don’t know is which heroes would make up the team.
Most iterations of X-FORCE have consisted of six or more rotating members, many of whom were minor characters that the average movie-goer would never recognize. It would seem more likely that Fox would merge some current X-MEN characters with some new blood being introduced in X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST like Bishop. While this is all just speculation, Marvel consultant at Fox Mark Millar offered this regarding the project:
“People are going to be dissecting every name as it gets released, so it will be cool when you have your five.”
The original Rob Liefeld team in 1989 consisted of Boom Boom, Cable, Cannonball, Domino, Feral, Shatterstar and Warpath. Of those names, Cable and Domino are the biggest likely to make it to a big screen version. The latest team featured in Uncanny X-Force was made up of Wolverine, Psylocke, Deadpool, Archangel, Fantomex, and E.V.A.
The most likely scenario would be to keep Deadpool, Psylocke, Archangel, and add in some combination of Cable, Bishop, and Wolverine. This would be an easier way to bring Deadpool to the big screen than the troubled standalone film. Plus, bringing Wolverine back to a squad outside of the X-MEN would allow those films to focus on the tons of other characters, like X-MEN: FIRST CLASS did successfully.
While Millar’s comment is far from the final word, at least we know an average number for our dream casting.
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST opens May 23, 2014 and THE WOLVERINE opens tomorrow.