With both Deadpool and X-Men: Apocalypse hitting cinemas next year (not to mention the new Gambit film in production), it's safe to say there'll be plenty of mutants on our screens for some time to come.
Not that we're complaining. In fact, producer Simon Kinberg has just made our day by teasing the possibility that all these characters might come together in a crossover movie at some point down the line.
"The idea is that we've sort of reset the timeline after Days Of Future Past in some ways," explained Kinberg to MTV, "and if not erased, certainly allowed for change from X1, 2, 3. Everything from Days Of Future Past forward, 1973, everything we set now becomes canon."
"So the Gambit movie, the Deadpool movie, will exist in a world that acknowledges whatever happened in Days Of Future Past and moving forward. Doesn’t mean they’ll always interact with those characters, obviously, it’s not like every movie has all the characters, but they all have to exist within the same rules. There will be interplay between different characters in different movies."
Is your head spinning? You're not the only one as even Kinberg admits he has trouble remembering the complicated X-Men timeline.
"I don’t have it up on a wall, but I have it on my computer, and I have it sort of tattooed on my brain now too," he says. "Nothing external, so that if I get knocked over the head, no one can read it. It’s literally behind my eyelids. But yeah, we have a clear sense of the directions we want to take them in and in my mind at least, how we could start to cross-pollinate sort of with those characters that have their standalone movies."
Deadpool is the first of the three potential crossover movies to be released, opening in the UK on February 5 2016 and the US a week later. X-Men: Apocalypse isn't far behind opening in the UK on May 19 2016 and the US on May 27 2016. Finally, we can look forward to a Channing Tatum-shaped Gambit film arriving on October 7 2016.
It’s going to be a busy year…
