Screenwriter and director Lee Sung Jin has sat down to shed light on the X-Men reboot, having been hired in April to rework the script alongside Jake Schreier and Joanna Calo.

Jin has additional credits on the Netflix show Beef, while Calo is the writer and showrunner for the hit series The Bear, and Schreier is the director of the MCU’s 36th feature installment, Thunderbolts*. Now the trio are teaming up to lead the Marvel superhero team made of mutants onto the big screen in a new era following a 20th Century Fox run beginning in 2000 and consisting of ten features. Screenwriter Sung Jin has shared details of where the upcoming rebooted material, released under Marvel Studios, will go.

“I’d say there were actually more parameters on Thunderbolts because it was plugging into an existing arc and existing characters,” Sung Jin shared. “Whereas with X-Men, Kevin [Feige] just wants to take a big swing and start anew, not be beholden to any of the movies that have come before.”

The screenwriter also revealed that “Schreier has such a clear vision in terms of wanting to get back to character first” and there is a goal to return to “those early [Chris] Claremont-run comics” and focus on the “team dynamics.”

“There were a lot of soapy elements to those comics. We’ve been in the room every day together,” Sung Jin added. “Kevin and Louis [D’Esposito] are so dialled in, and they have such incredible instincts that it’s been fun to just blue-sky.”

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The writer revealed he is “such a big fan of that IP of the comics” and explained how childhood memories of watching the superheroes onscreen have influenced this new, upcoming direction.

“My dad and I, every Saturday morning, used to watch the show on television, so to be able to look around this Marvel conference room and have every X-Men character on the board and be able to spitball and freestyle on, ‘What about this person?’ It’s so emboldening because you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this isn’t going to be a safe movie. This is actually going to be a really exciting new take.'”

Sung Jin concluded that this mental approach to these new stories consists of asking questions such as “‘Would younger me want to run to the movie theatre to watch this? Are we honouring all the amazing work that the comics set up? Are we playing it safe? Are we pushing things?’ It’s just trying to look at my childhood self, who loved these characters so much, and making sure we’re doing right by him and all the other fans that love X-Men.”

The 20th Century Fox X-Men are also due to make their MCU debut in Avengers: Doomsday on December 17th.

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