While promoting X-Men: Days of Future Past producer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg was questioned about the next movie in the franchise X-Men: Apocalypse (via Moviepilot). He first talks about humanizing the title villain for the next film "What the comics do best and I think Bryan's done so well with these movies is humanizing, dramatizing the characters. I's really been about how do we give him [Apocalypse], most importantly, a very human and relatable motivation so that as extreme and insane as his methods are, there is something, you know, understandable, almost empathetic about his motivation. Some of that is in the books, some of that is us building on that. You know, fully dimensionalizing the character, but it is a huge part of the task of adapting the story of Apocalypse. It is making him, while larger than life also dow to a human, emotional scale. We're definitely approaching him as a super charismatic leader that will draw people to his cause. So far, in the X-Men movies, there really are two leaders. You know, there's Eric/Magneto and what he did with the Brotherhood and Charles/Professor Xavier and what he did with the X-Men. Apocalypse presents a new leader, the darkest leader in the franchise."
He then goes onto add that he has gone to reread the original Age of Apocalypse story line."I had read Age of Apocalypse and most of the appearances of Apocalypse before thinking about the movie, but went back and reread it and I think one of the things that's most exciting about it is the potential for the visual scale of the movie, and so it is a larger story than even Days of Future Past. In Days of Future Past, they're trying to stop something that's not extinction level in the moment, although it could be one day. There's not an immediacy in the plot and this is a plot that actually has extinction level stakes and is even more global than anything we've ever seen before. There's a lot of architecture from the stories that we'll be using. It will be about his character emotionally, you know, like who is he? Not just as a mutant, but as a person."
He then goes onto talk about how Apocalypse won't have much time-travel like in Days of Future Past."The Apocalypse story has a lot of different ways of telling stories," he said. "That was one of the things that I liked about Days of Future Past: Doing a time travel movie where it's not just sending someone back in time, but actually intercutting between the past and the future that we really haven't seen in a movie before. Usually you have somebody go back and stay in the past the whole movie. Apocalypse has some, without getting into detail, as you know from the books, has some innovative, different ways of storytelling also."
Then finally he comments on the fan casting of Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave) taking on a young Storm "I've certainly been reading about it; she's a great actress"As well as comments on Channing Tatum being cast as the Ragging Cajun Gambit."I think Gambit's one of the coolest characters that hasn't been heavily featured, I mean, he was in the first Wolverine movie, but he hasn't really been heavily featured in the main X-Men movies. I think Channing will be amazing playing him. What I like about the character is that my favorite characters in the comics are anti-heroes like Batman, like Wolverine, like Iron Man. I think Gambit fits into that classification because he's a thief, he's rogue, he's a little destructive. I think he's one of the more dynamic characters in the X-Men world. He's certainly one as a fan that could be explored more."
X-Men: Apocalypse hits May 2016
