Anna Daniels
An X-Force movie seemed like a sure thing for a little while, but after Disney’s acquisition of Fox, that certainty turned to shakiness. X-Force comic creator Rob Liefeld referred to the movie as a “victim of the merger” and implied that it was no longer happening, and while there’s always a chance that Marvel Studios decides to make one now that those X-Men-adjacent characters have reverted back to their control, let’s take a brief glimpse into an alternate universe in which X-Force became not just one movie, but a trilogy from director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2, Fantasy Island).
Wadlow was hired to write and potentially direct X-Force back in 2013, and in a recent interview, he not only shares his plans for a trilogy that never happened, but practically begs Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige for a job.
Created by Rob Liefeld, X-Force is essentially a dark mirror version of the X-Men. But unlike Charles Xavier’s team of gifted youngsters, which often fights in the public eye to win mutants respect from regular humans, the X-Force tends to embark on darker, more violent, sometimes morally questionable missions to protect mutantkind from threats the X-Men can’t (or don’t want to) handle. The comic was hugely popular in the 1990s, and with Fox’s X-Men movies losing some of their creative spark, the studio decided it was time to bring this new team to the big screen.
Speaking with Comic Book Movie (via The Playlist), Wadlow explains what he would have done with the property if he were given the chance to actually see his vision all the way through:
“What I can share about my take on the property, as it’s not really relevant any more since Deadpool 2 introduced Cable and I wrote X-Force before Deadpool 1 even came out, is that it asked if X-Men was about mutants who get to go to private school with Wolverine and Professor X, and have the Blackbird swooping down to pick them up, what about the mutants that have to go to public school? What about the ones who don’t have the benefactor looking out for them, and what about the kids who have to figure it out on their own? We then would have introduced that darker, more militant mentor in the form of Cable.
I plotted out this three movie arc that took X-Force from what it was in the ’90s with Rob Liefeld with a band of kids fighting for what they believe in, and then by the third film, the group would have grown and changed and lost and picked up some new members, and basically turned into Rick Remender’s version of the X-Force in the early 2000s. That was a much darker hit squad and black ops team who had lost their way over the course of the three films.”
When asked if he was interested in working with Marvel Studios on a possible version of X-Force, he made it clear that he really, really wants that job:
“Kevin Feige, if you’re reading this, I will do anything at all to work on your version of the X-Men and X-Force. I’m a filmmaker because of 90s comics, so I obviously love them dearly, and it was actually a dream come true for me to write X-Force and meet Rob Liefeld. I loved doing it and would of course do anything to be part of whatever new iteration they have planned.”
I’d assume that re-launching characters like X-Men and Fantastic Four are higher priorities for Feige right now, but who knows? Maybe the fact that Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were so successful means that he’ll want to keep those iterations of the characters going and thinks that an X-Force movie might be a good way to go about doing that. But, and no offense to Wadlow here, if I had my choice of a filmmaker being hired for a Marvel Studios version of X-Force who’d been attached to a previous version, I’d choose Drew Goddard ten times out of ten.
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