Fox Plans Three X-Men Films Each Year in 2019 and 2020

CBR

By Kevin Melrose

Published Feb 27, 2018

With its acquisition by Disney looming, Fox shows no signs of dialing back plans for its blockbuster X-Men movie franchise.

Despite a looming acquisition by Disney, 20th Century Fox shows no signs of slowing down its plans for the blockbuster X-Men franchise. In fact, a new report indicates the studio plans to release eight X-Men movies over the next three years.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, this year's Deadpool 2 and X-Men: Dark Phoenix are scheduled to be followed in 2019 by three franchise installment, and in 2020 by three more.

We know that The New Mutants accounts for one of those 2019 releases, as director Josh Boone's film was recently moved from its announced April 2018 date to February 2019, to allow time to play up its horror elements and, apparently, to add another character in reshoots. Channing Tatum's long-suffering Gambit, which last month lost its third director in Gore Verbinski, is still on the calendar for June 7, 2019, but given the spinoff's history of delays, there's little indication it will hit that date.

That leaves question marks above at least four of those six projects targeted for 2018-2019. The highly anticipated X-Force, which spins out of Deadpool 2, is widely expected to begin principal photography in October, so we can likely give that film one of those spots. However, the picture gets fuzzier from there. Deadpool and X-Men sequels are safe bets, and Boone envisions The New Mutants as a trilogy, but there's also 143, the Tim Miller/Brian Michael Bendis project thought to star Kitty Pryde, as well as a rumored Multiple Man movie (with or without James Franco).

The next installment in Fox's X-Men franchise arrives May 18 with director David Leitch's Deadpool 2, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Stefan Kapičić as the voice of Colossus, and Karan Soni as Dopinder, with newcomers Zazie Beetz as Domino and Josh Brolin as Cable, with Julian Dennison in an unknown role, and Jack Kesy as a villain widely thought to be Black Tom Cassidy.