Posted in: Marvel Studios, Movies | Tagged: Jake Schreier, thunderbolts, x-men

Jake Schreier Learned A Lot On Thunderbolts* As He Heads Into X-Me

Director Jake Schreier learned a lot working on Thunderbolts, and he's bringing that knowledge with him as he starts work on X-Men.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe remains in a very weird place. This year has been a bit inconsistent. Captain America: Brave New World underperformed critically and commercially, Thunderbolts* was about as close to a critical darling as the MCU gets these days, but couldn't find a theatrical audience, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps were both pretty good in terms of box office and reviews, but it didn't light the world on fire. We have a significant break between films now, and some new projects are forming on the horizon. We've known the X-Men would be making their way into the MCU for a while now, and thanks to the chair stream from hell, we know the Mutants of the Fox era will play a major role in Avengers: Doomsday.

However, what happens beyond that? We know that an X-Men film is on the way, and we learned at the beginning of May that Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier was in talks to bring some of Marvel's biggest characters to the MCU. That has since been confirmed, and while we don't know much, Schreier does have something that other Marvel directors didn't have; his first experience in the MCU was a group movie, so he had to learn right off the bat how to balance a team dynamic and make sure characters got their moments. Schreier recently spoke to Empire, and while he artfully dodged anything story-related (also, they just started on this), he revealed that the lessons he learned during Thunderbolts* are ones he'll bring to his work on X-Men.

"I can't say anything about it, but we've started work on X-Men, and that's obviously very, very exciting," Schreier confirmed. "There are so many things that I didn't know about before I started [Thunderbolts*]. The biggest learning curve for me was the proportion of the action to the more emotional, character-driven scenes, and how, even though it's more shooting days than I've ever had, they get eaten up quite quickly by the action stuff. By the time we got to the end of it, it felt like, 'Oh, now I feel like we get how to do this a little bit better.'"

In the middle of July, Kevin Feige spoke a bit about the X-Men and specifically how they will be recast post-Avengers: Secret. Feige explained, "Reboot is a scary word. Reboot can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Reset, singular timeline — we're thinking along those lines. … 'X-Men' is where that will happen next." So the version of the X-Men that Schreier is (likely) working on is for a cast and maybe even a timeline of the MCU we haven't seen yet. You can't really talk about the film without giving away at least something about what a post-Secret Wars MCU will look like, so expect next to nothing about this or any film coming out after Secret Wars for a while. 

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