December 19, 2012

Could Christopher McQuarrie Help Develop Fox's Marvel Universe?


Christopher McQuarrie is best known for his screenwriting work on The Usual Suspects which earned him an Oscar. However, he's moving into the directing field with Jack Reacher and is being linked to direct Mission: Impossible 5. McQuarrie is uncredited but did help develop the X-Men franchise with Bryan Singer. Chris helped add some elements to the first two films and recently wrote the script for The Wolverine. In an interview with ScreenRant he mentions a meeting with Fox to help them flush out an expansive film universe for the X-Men. Similar to Marvel's cohesive cinematic universe that lead to Avengers' massive success.  


"You know, Bryan and I have talked about it a bunch of times – and in fact, right after I got back from shooting [Jack Reacher] I had a meeting with Tom Rothman – just a general meeting – and I said to Tom, ‘You know what I’d really love to do, is I’d really love to flesh out the X-Men Universe for you. You have this great wealth of these Marvel characters, and the X-Men franchise has only focused on a small handful of them – there’s many more.'" 

"And I thought that it’d be really cool to create a ‘bible’ – you know, a series of outlines of interlocking movies where you could do kind of what they did with ‘The Avengers,’ where you’re creating multiple movies that could come together as one movie here and there. And… you know… I never heard back [laughs]. But that would kinda be fun – to do something like that – where you could kind of become the curator for something like that." 


The only problem is that Fox hasn't really followed up on Christopher's offer and he could move on to write/direct other projects. Fox confirmed plans for their own Marvel film universe which would begin with The Wolverine leading into X-Men Days of Future Past and Josh Trank's Fantastic Four reboot. Producer Lauren Shuler Donner even stating we could be seeing the X-Men joining future installments of the Avengers if Marvel Studios was open to it. While Feige confirmed that Marvel and Fox co-owned mutants Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver who are established members of the Avengers and X-Men. Wolverine would be their big get as he's been one of the biggest faces of the Avengers team since the 90's.

Mark Millar had been hired to oversee the creative-side of this direction but a visionary hasn't been tapped to put it all together. Millar isn't a screenwriter and likely will be around to explain characters/storylines. Fox doesn't have a Joss Whedon so it sounds like they'll have to split the tasks to a group of people. Having McQuarrie involved could only improve chances for success, not to mention a director who could help make these spin-off films. Deadpool is still in limbo with Tim Miller signing on to a bunch of other directing projects. Also, if The Wolverine is successful enough they'll pursue a third film. X-Men 4, New Mutants/X-Force and Cable films have also been mentioned for possible next Marvel projects for the studio.







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