‘X-Men,’ ‘Gambit’ and ‘Deadpool’ Crossovers Planned

With the X-Men timeline effectively reset following the events in Days of Future Past, and with Gambit and Deadpool movies on the way, 20th Century Fox’s version of the MCU is now open to more interesting possibilities. Writer and producer Simon Kinberg has previously hinted at crossover possibilities within the mutant cinematic universe, but his latest statements suggest that the idea has moved from hypothetical to legitimate plan.

We’ve heard rumors of a potential Fantastic Four and X-Men crossover for some time now, and with Fox still planning to make a Fantastic Four sequel (for some silly reason), that’s certainly still possible. But it would make much more sense to have the X-Men and the characters from the spinoffs crossover, and Kinberg indicates that’s certainly the plan.

While promoting The Martian at TIFF, MTV spoke to Kinberg about the future of the X-Men franchise as well as its spinoff films, Deadpool and Gambit. Kinberg acknowledges that they’ve “reset the timeline” in the X-Men universe, making the first five films sort of irrelevant. In addition, he says we can probably expect to see characters from each of these films “interacting” with one another:

The idea is that we’ve sort of reset the timeline after ’Days of Future Past’ in some ways, 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.

Kinberg goes on to explain that he does have a detailed plan for these crossovers:

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…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 my mind at least, how we could start to cross-pollinate sort of with those characters that have their standalone movies.

It’s unclear when we’ll finally see Deadpool and Gambit interacting with the other X-Men characters — a post-credits scene in either of those films to begin setting up the crossovers seems like a strong possibility, at the very least.

Deadpool hits theaters on February 12, 2016, followed by X-Men: Apocalypse on May 16, 2016, and Gambit on October 7, 2016.

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