X-Men: First Class Director Would "Never Say Never" to Returning to Marvel Franchise

Argylle director Matthew Vaughn has a crazy history with the X-Men movie franchise. While a lot of Marvel fans know Vaughn as the director of the soft reboot film X-Men: First Class – what they may not know is that Vaughn was once the co-writer and director of X-Men: The Last Stand before he left the project over a mix of personal and professional reasons. 

It was a big deal, then, that Vaughn returned for X-Men: First Class – and it spoke volumes when  Vaughn didn't return for the sequel film, X-Men: Days of Future Past, choosing to instead pursue his own new IP project, Kingsman: The Secret Service. Vaughn helped with the story of DoFP but stepped away from X-Men thereafter. In the years since X-Men: First Class, Vaughn has been pretty forthright about the fact that he had a hell of a time while making the X-Men movies – from seeing the insanity of Halle Berry getting a fake X-Men 3 script to lure her back into the franchise, to the backlash he received for leaving The Last Stand. That's not even counting the hurdles he had to get through to make First Class even close to being the film he wanted to make – a clear point of frustration with the entire studio system and/or established IPs. 

During the press junket for Argylle, one of Uproxx's reporters asked Matthew Vaughn if he would make First Class fans happy and return to the X-Men movies when they relaunch in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Vaughn's answer had a familiar firm conciseness to it: "The answer to that is it's not my decision. One of the reasons I left the X-Men universe." 

When it was pointed out that X-Men going to the MCU represented the opportunity for a new start, Vaughn didn't agree that there was as much novelty in the reboot as many fans may think: 

"Yeah, but it's still 'the company.' I would never say never. If they asked and if there was a way of doing something really, really good, why not? 

The thing is, I have so much of my own stuff to do now that, doing something for someone else, it really has to be something so special. But who knows?"

Funny enough, the biggest hangup for Vaughn isn't returning to Marvel, it's finally getting some DC work that he's spent decades campaigning for: 

"Ironically...I'd always wanted to make a Superman movie. But I've missed that one. So there's something about Superman. But that's not Marvel, but who knows, maybe. I'm never saying never."

Argylle is now in theaters.