X-Men: Apocalypse - Five Potential Directors To Follow Bryan Singer's Time Travel Epic

At this point, it's looking like the odds of filmmaker Bryan Singer getting back on track in time to start directing X-Men: Apocalypse are pretty small. 20th Century Fox, fresh off a hit with The Wolverine, want to capitalize on the popularity of the X-Men franchise so badly that they had already greenlit the new movie and announced the title before X-Men: Days of Future Past was even finished being edited. Now that Days of Future Past isn't far off, though, one has to wonder how long they'll wait for its director -- Singer -- to figure out whether a potentially damaging civil suit filed against him this week for alleged sexual abuse of a minor in the 1990s will prevent him from taking a high-visibility job like directing a major superhero tentpole. While no director had yet been announced for X-Men: Apocalypse, it was widely assumed that the job was Singer's (who also directed X-Men and X2: X-Men United) to decline. If he can't or won't take it, it may be back to the drawing board for a studio that already has a release date in place. Meanwhile, X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn has not only got a full plate of other projects, but has commented in the past that sequels don't interest him much anyway. Jeff Wadlow, expected to direct the X-Force spinoff, just inked a deal to take over He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and so is presumably off the table for a while. That means the obvious choices are all out of the picture, leaving Fox with a rather tricky question: how do you get a film in production soon, which is expected to be in theaters in 2016...if there's no director, and all the candidates who could presumably just pick up the ball and run with it are indisposed? Well, we've got some ideas for directors who could step up and make it work... Note: A previous version of this story misidentified Pete Travis as Dredd writer Alex Garland. Mostly because I'm a moron.

Gary Ross The director of The Hunger Games would be an inspired choice; while he's only ever made three films as a director, he's been around Hollywood for years and two of those three were truly massive financial successes (Pleasantville was a small movie all around and didn't deliver the kind of box office that The Hunger Games and Seabiscuit did). He's been rumored for a number of projects since Lionsgate decided to go another way with the second Hunger Games movie, and X-Men would not only be a massive franchise to tie himself to, but it would give him an opportunity to reteam with Jennifer Lawrence, who broke big in X-Men: First Class just before The Hunger Games hit. His downside? He reportedly walked out on negotiations about The Hunger Games because of a scheduling issue, thinking that the studio wasn't giving him enough money to do a truly great second installment. That could certainly be a problem with Apocalypse if he were told "Hey, we want to hire you. Filming starts in a week."

John McTiernan The director of Die Hard and The Thomas Crown Affair is currently directing his first film in ten years -- Red Squad, starring Nicolas Cage and with a reported budget of $30 million. That suggests that the incubation time for the movie likely won't be too long, and while he hasn't been active recently (and just got done serving a year in prison for lying to the FBI in relation to a Hollywood wiretapping scandal), his grasp on action and character are both top notch and assuming he hasn't lost a step since the old days, betting on McTiernan could be a good move. The potential downside is fairly obvious, though; he's an older director who hasn't worked a lot since the turn of the century, and his most recent feature -- Basic -- received a pretty lukewarm reception. Hiring him on could be an inspired move, but it could just as easily turn into Bullet to the Head, which saw famed director Walter Hill take on his first feature in more than a decade and disappoint everyone involved.

Darren Aronofsky Few directors have pitched more comic book movies, come closer and walked away empty-handed than Noah and Black Swan filmmaker Aronofsky, who was the second choice to direct Batman Begins and then The Wolverine, with scattered stories in between that he may have pitched for things like Man of Steel. He's also turned around a movie every two years since 2006's The Fountain and each of them has received critical acclaim and at least a modicum of box office success (Noah has been a bit anemic domestically but international ticket sales have made up for it, and the movie has now doubled its budget). He's also a bona fide comic book fan, having done comics or graphic novels based on both The Fountain and Noah. That's a strategy that has, so far, been rewarding Marvel with Joss Whedon, Warner Bros. with the Arrow showrunners and more. Assuming Jackman was to come back (probably not a safe assumption, since the movie will take place in the 1980s and we saw he didn't actually join the X-Men until the late '90s...but then, after the time-travel orgy of Days of Future Past, it's hard to be totally sure what will and won't count by 2016), Aronofsky will have at least that friend on the set, as well; part of the appeal of bringing him to The Wolverine would have been that he and Jackman worked together on The Fountain and hit it off. His downside, if he has one, is likely that he would demand much more creative control than would most potential directors on a project like this. Aronofsky doesn't need the work or the money, and if he leaves this film to go make something that wins him a few more Oscar nominations and makes him a handful of more millions of dollars it would be Fox that regretted the call, not him. There's also the possibility that one of his long-dormant scripts is just now being finished and will be announced as his next movie soon (as pretty much happened with Noah after he failed to come to a deal for The Wolverine). His inner circle is fairly small and it seems you don't know what he's got percolating until he announces it.

Pete Travis Travis would bring a strong visual style to the project -- and a dark one, at that, if Dredd is anything to go by. Of course, from a purely financial point of view, Dredd was a failure, so bringing in its director to helm a $150 million comic book movie seems like an odd choice on the face of it. Then again, it was Brett Ratner, not Singer, who gave the X-Men franchise its best-ever outing at the box office and all anyone has done since launching production on Days of Future Past is to subtlely and not-so-subtlely slam X-Men: The Last Stand. It seems that Fox has a sense that making the fans feel at least a little bit listened to is a winning strategy for these films. And it isn't without precedent. The low-grossing but fan-favorite comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was directed by Edgar Wright...who promptly got a gig directing Ant-Man. (Granted, he'd been developing Ant-Man before the failure of Scott Pilgrim but given the timing of the announcement at Comic Con 2012...well, you get it.)

Doug Liman In all likelihood, Liman's Everest, which just started filming, takes him off the table. But the The Bourne Identity director, who was also once in line to make Watchmen, would be a solid choice to make a smart, character-driven action film...and this week's tragic avalanche at Mount Everest may force a delay in production. If it does, perhaps that film -- which hasn't really kicked into high gear yet -- could be put on a longer hold for Liman to bring his cool visual style and corporate-friendly sensibilities to the table.