After Bryan Singer dropped his megaton announcement last week many wondered if he would be directing the next entry in the X-Men series. After all, he didn’t handle X3, and he served as a storywriter and producer for First Class, so he’s shown that he’s not necessarily tied at the hip to the director’s chair. Vulture is now reporting that he is, indeed, set to helm X-Men: Apocalypse. This would mark the first time the director has done back-to-back X-Men films since he did the first two.

Also of note in the report is that the next film will center on the younger stars/characters in the X-universe. With First Class, they made the first X-Men film that didn’t star series leads Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, or Halle Berry. It instead focused on Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, and other newcomers to the franchise. With next summer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, the massive production created a marriage between the two and many wondered what direction the series would be heading in afterward. Vulture claims that Apocalypse will indeed return to the Fassbender-McAvoy group, and not continue with the original stars. 

If true, this would be welcome news to a large contingency of fans that worried that the films would once again become vehicles for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. It also shows 20th Century Fox’s faith in the world that Singer set up in First Class. DoFP is said to be the second most expensive film Fox has ever produced, after Avatar, and it’s clear that they’re ready to fully invest in whatever Singer’s got in mind for the future of the franchise.

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