Alpha Flight, Exiles And More Are On X-Men Movie Producer’s Radar

With Hugh Jackman bowing out of his role as Wolverine following Logan, 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise loses its 17-year staple and main attraction. Luckily for the studio, it found massive success with Deadpool in 2016, breathing all new life into their X-Men movie world and helping to set the stage for X-Force and New Mutants movies.

Going forward, the filmmakers behind the upcoming slate of X-Men movies will continue to expand their roster of characters adapted from Marvel Comics to their big screen adventures. Speaking to ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview ahead of Logan’s release, producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker revealed a peak into the future of their

“We have a sense of where each of all of the existing characters go from Deadpool to New Mutants to the mainland X-Men movies to potentially even X-23,” Kinberg said. “Then, there’s other characters, like X-Flight, like Exiles… There’s a lot of characters to mine going forward. We’re still sort of in this phase where now we’ve completed the Wolverine story with Logan and we begin hopefully with New Mutants and eventually Gambit and continue with Deadpool.”

What’s most interesting about Kinberg’s comments is that X-Flight, likely meaning Alpha Flight, and the Exiles are on the radar for the future of the X-Men franchise. Alpha Flight, first introduced in April of 1979 in X-Men #120, consists of characters such as Guardians, Northstar, Aurora, Sasquatch, Shaman, Snowbird, and Puck. One of their first missions was to retrieve Wolverine! The Exiles would also be a largely new to television bunch, consisting of Blink (who was recently cast for the X-Men TV series), Nocturne, Morph, Thunderbird, Mimic, and Magnus.

As for the films immediately on the slate ahead, the creative announcements were confirmed, with The A-Team‘s Joe Carnahan in place to write the X-Force movie and an unnamed director being eyed for the job. Drew Goddard will also be teaming up with Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick for the sequel.

“Drew Goddard has been a consultant and part of the process and brain trust on Deadpool 2 but Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are still working on the script of Deadpool 2 and will be there every step of the way and will be there on set the way they were on Deadpool 1 and will be a guiding force with Ryan [Reynolds],” Kinberg said. “They’re like creative partners with Ryan and we call them the Deadpool team.”

None of the X-Men films beyond Logan have clear cut release dates, but the studio has plans for Deadpool 2, X-Force, and New Mutants within the cinematic universe. Kinberg also shared an update on Channing Tatum’s Gambit film, which is still in development, and says 20th Century Fox still has plans for a “great” Fantastic Four film.

Logan hits theaters on March 3, 2017, currently ranked as the fourth most-anticipated film in ComicBook.com’s anticipation rankings database.