There have been rumors galore for the past several months regarding the next entry in the X-Men franchise. Longtime writer and producer for the series, Simon Kinberg, was supposedly on deck to direct the next film, X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Kinberg himself has been mum on the whole thing, as one would expect from someone as experience as him, though that didn’t really didn’t shake our thoughts that he would be directing the next film.

Now, a new report from Deadline is stating that 20th Century Fox have formalized Simon Kinberg as the director of the series. Given his involvement of the series over the past decade or so, this is a move that was a long time coming. The film has also been given an official release date of November 2, 2018. This will put the film up against live-action Disney’s Mulan, and an untitled Paramount event flick. That’s some pretty stiff competition, but hopefully between those three, there will be enough difference in the demographic they’re shooting for that no film will take a big hit.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of news to come from this is that pretty much everyone from the core cast — including Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Alexandra Shipp, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, and Kodi Smit-McPhee — are all returning. While most of the cast is no surprise, the one standout is Jennifer Lawrence, who seemed to have checked out of this film with X-Men: Apocalypse. That being said, Apocalypse was a less than stellar (albeit fun) entry in the franchise, so maybe it had more to do with that than it had to do with the franchise as a whole. Anyways, with her returning, hopefully it’s an indication that she’s on board with the script of the film.

Finally, the outlet reported that Jessica Chastain is in talks to join as the villain Shi’ar Empress Lilandra, a character who was most recently speculated to be played by Angelina Jolie. We’ll have to wait to see if that pans out.

RELATED: Simon Kinberg Talks X3 Regrets

This film is a long time coming for fans who have been waiting to see the Dark Phoenix Saga done right on the big screen. While we did get a taste of that in X-Men: The Last Stand, but it was ultimately a secondary plotline that was never given the spotlight it deserved, as even Kinberg admitted in an interview we had with him earlier this year.

“My regrets about X3—and there are things that I think are really great in that movie and for a lot of people they like that movie—but my regret about the movie is that the Dark Phoenix story was sort of the subplot and the main plot was the cure story, if you remember. I think the main mistake (among others) we made in that movie was taking something that is as profound, dramatic and epic, potentially, as the Dark Phoenix story, and pushing it down to be the B-plot of a movie when it really should be the A-plot of maybe one or more movies. That’s I guess what I would say about is that I felt as though we—for whatever reason, and it was a combination of different impulses and different input—we made a movie that wasn’t truly a Dark Phoenix story, it was a continuation of the X-Men saga and Dark Phoenix was one of the stories within it instead of focusing on Dark Phoenix as the story.”

What do you think of all this news? Are you excited to see Kinberg at the helm, and the core cast returning? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: Deadline

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