After getting his start in Hollywood writing the 2005 blockbusters xXx: State of the Union and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Simon Kinberg was brought on to write the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand. Kinberg returned to the X-Men film series as a producer on First Class, and since then, with the exception of The Wolverine, he's had a hand in every X-Men related movie that's come out, be it as a producer, writer or, in the case of Dark Phoenix, director. Including the upcoming features, that adds up to nine movies, but when recently asked if that was "too much," Kinberg answered that he still wants to keep making X-Men movies, as the spinoffs have paved the way for new creative paths. As Kinberg put it:
I hope never. We have found in terms of doing stand-alone movies like Logan and Deadpool that we can smuggle a different genre into the comic book movie. Logan was a Western, and Deadpool was like a Monty Python, R-rated comedy.
It's been nearly two decades since the superhero movie genre started becoming more popular, and 2000's X-Men obviously played a huge part with that. But with each new superhero movie comes more obligation for the forthcoming ones to be unique and distinguish themselves from the crowd. Mixing in another genre is a good way of accomplishing this, and while the main X-Men movies arguably still feel like "standard" superhero movies, as Simon Kinberg noted, Logan and the Deadpool movies have taken advantage of this approach. Next year's The New Mutants will also do that by resting firmly in the horror genre. So even though he's worked on nearly 10 X-Men movies, the creative freedoms allowed with these spinoffs has made it so that working on the franchise hasn't become repetitive or dull.
Simon Kinberg also mentioned in a roundtable appearance with THR that in his experience with the X-Men movies, he isn't concerned with the idea that having too many movies in a franchise will turn off new fans. Kinberg explained:
I feel the obligation is the opposite. It's not a barrier of entry in terms of catching the audience up, it's actually a barrier of catching the audience off guard. You want audiences to feel that it's not the same movie. It is as fresh as any other movie out there, it's not being compared to previous X-Men movies, it's being compared to Black Panther, to Avengers, to Arrival, anything within the genre spaces we're talking about.
Again, this goes back to embarking in new creative directions. If every X-Men movie felt too similar to the previous ones, then no matter how popular these characters are, the film franchise might have died a while back. X-Men: First Class arguably resuscitated the main X-Men film series by winding the clock back several decades, and the Deadpool movies and Logan have staked out their own special territory, performing well critically and commercially in the process.
With Deadpool 2 having come out in June, the next X-Men movie up is Dark Phoenix, which comes out on February 14, 2019, followed by The New Mutants on August 2, 2019. For a full lineup of what X-Men cinematic projects have been announced or reported/rumored, look through our handy guide.
