Ready or Not, Here Comes Fox's X-Men Cinematic Universe

You had to know this was coming.

Speaking with MTV News at the Toronto International Film Festival to support his film The Martian as producer, Simon Kinberg verified there's still a plan to have characters from Deadpool and Gambit "cross-pollinate" with future X-Men films in a shared cinematic universe similar to Marvel Studios'.

And yes, anyone who has seen X-Men: Days of Future Past probably realizes that there's a brand-new X-Men film continuity to play around in.  "The idea is that we’ve sort of reset the timeline after Days of Future Past in some ways," said Kinberg, "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," he confirmed.

Kinberg also said that he keeps track of where and when all of these wacky mutants are in the new shared universe continuity.  "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 remarked.  "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."

As for the gradual shift into more bizarre costume designs, as evidenced by Oscar Isaac's character Apocalypse in the upcoming film X-Men: Apocalypse, Kinberg remarked, "I feel like we have been, the X-Men franchise, has been growing a little bit more into science fiction.  I think Days of Future Past with time travel and the Sentinels took us into a slightly broader, more science fiction world than the films had occupied in the past.  We felt like the movies were ready for something that was slightly more, let’s say, cosmic.  Once we made the decision for Apocalypse to be the villain at the center of the movie, we wanted to be true to the comics, which are sort of, like you, say, not costume, but it’s not just a guy in a helmet.  It is more cosmic."

X-Men: Apocalypse is scheduled to arrive in theaters on May 27, 2016.