Since the disappointing box office performance of Apocalypse, which was also the final X-movie in the contracts of stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, it's been heavily rumored that Sony would "reboot" the X-Men movie franchise with a new cast. The studio has also talked about wanting to take another stab at adapting Chris Claremont's iconic Dark Phoenix Saga storyline from the comics, which was...depicted less than successfully (to put it mildly) in the infamously terrible X-Men III: The Last Stand.
Well, plans for the movie have now been formalized and, surprisingly, pretty much the entire cast from Apocalypse will be returning!
Kinberg is producing with Bryan Singer, Hutch Parker and Lauren Shuler Donner. This is a huge moment for Kinberg, who gets his turn behind the camera after serving as a creative backbone for the X-Men franchise films since writing 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand; he wrote and produced X-Men: Days Of Future Past, and X-Men: Apocalypse. He is making his directorial debut, but knows the mythology like the back of his hand. Kinberg has been a producer on the spinoff Deadpool and its currently shooting sequel, as well as X-Men: The New Mutants and X-Men: First Class.
The only thing about this that sounds a bit odd at this stage is the description of Lilandra as the film's "main villain". In the comics, she was not a villain at all; in fact, she and Charles Xavier were married at one point!
They finally released a trailer for this, as well.