So how do we address the people that are hurt by that? How do we address our fellow citizens who are caught in the middle? What I'm saying is, when we take steps forward, they're not irreversible, unfortunately. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants. The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. Not long ago I wrote a story focused on Magneto in which the United States, under the mutant control act, is gathering up mutant families and imprisoning them in New Mexico "for their own safety." Kids are put in one facility, parents are put in another, and they'll be held until such time as its determined whether they're a threat to the country, and if they are, they'll be dealt with in accordance with federal policy.Īnd Magneto is talking about his own experiences as a younger man, gathered around people in a coffee shop who are all learning the news about the mutant control act – some saying "It's about time, we've got to do something about these mutants." Magneto goes out to the facility, he's recognized as a mutant, they engage, and Magneto, of course, defeats them and dismantles the facility.īut the point is, if one group can be dealt with in this way by government fiat, what's to stop them from going after any other group? Nrama: In 2019, what do you see as the fundamental parts of the X-Men mythos that define the team for the modern age?Ĭlaremont: Heartbreakingly, as a concept, it feels more necessary and relevant in the zeitgeist than ever. Can you clue us in on any ideas or projects you may have in store?Ĭlaremont: There are always stories I'd like to tell, but I don't give the assignments. Nrama: In terms of comic books, fans are always ready for more X-Men from you. Needing access to those streaming services to watch a show like that could be an obstacle if the product isn't worth the money. You do it in those sequential bursts, 8 or 12 issues, or episodes.Īs for whether it would work on something like Disney+, ask me once the service is out and we'll see how it plays.
Nrama: Do you think that kind of story would be better told in a series of films, or as a TV show, maybe something streaming on Disney Plus?Ĭlaremont: The paradigm I've seen now for telling that kind of story is, you can do it as a TV series and do that kind of evolving narrative justice like HBO did with adapting Game of Thrones. It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.
The challenge is, in terms of a canon like X-Men, it's more like Harry Potter and Hogwarts, or Game of Thrones. You can tell a good story in that timeframe, which I think Simon did, but it's not the evocation of the story that Dave and John and Paul and I created, it doesn't have the impact of knowing the characters and their dynamics and building to it conclusively in this narrative way. My problem with both iterations of Dark Phoenix onscreen, the original by Brett Ratner and the newer version by Simon Kinberg, is, I don't think you can do it effectively in 90 minutes. You have to find a way to bring Xavier's school and the X-Men to the screen in a unified concept while also building the world piece-by-piece so the audience falls in love with it the same way.įor me as a storyteller, the ideal way to do that would be following HBO's lead with Game of Thrones, where you take 12 episodes – in other words, 12 issues – and you create the world and introduce the characters, and let the audience fall in love with them as you go along. You can't really do a solo Cyclops movie, then a Storm movie, then a Nightcrawler movie, and so forth. And with X-Men, that needs to happen as well – except it's one single concept. Kevin Feige was building and expanding the world piece by piece every step of the way.
We barely saw him in the background, but he was there. So the audience gradually fell in love with the characters and the world those characters inhabit over a series of stories. The challenge with X-Men is, if you notice how Marvel produced the Avengers films, they set them in motion with solo films – Iron Man, Thor, Captain America – then you had them come together for Avengers.