‘X-Men’ Movie Eyes Thunderbolts Filmmaker Jake Schreier as Director

Jake Schreier, hot off of directing Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, is in talks to return to the company with the big-screen reboots of the X-Men.

Sources confirm that Schreier, whose movie garnered some of the best reviews for Marvel in quite a few years, is engaged in early talks in for the gig. Michael Lesslie, a writer on Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, is penning the script with Marvel’s Kevin Feige, as usual, producing the feature, which is currently untitled.

Marvel has been quietly moving ahead on finding the X-Men director front for a few weeks now. Talk of a director heated up this week.

The development finally puts an X-Men movie from Marvel on a track to viability. The title, first created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early 1960s, has been the most popular Marvel comic book title since the 1980s and then a popular cartoon in the 1990s. And the Bryan Singer-directed movie released in 2000 was one of the movies that ushered in the modern comic book movie era, with its cast becoming emmeshed in popular culture. Even now, 25 years later, actors such as Hugh Jackman are still playing their roles to the delight of audiences. (See last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which grossed over $1.3 billion.)

For 20^th Century Fox, the studio behind the movies, the franchise proved to be a long-lasting money maker until it ran out of steam with 2019’s Dark Phoenix, followed by the sad pandemic release of spin-off The New Mutants. By then, Disney had grandly purchased Fox and legion of fans have been waiting impatiently for their big-screen return since.

Marvel has been careful in its development and has teased the original cast in some of its movies, such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Patrick Stewart’s Professor X) and aforementioned Deadpool & Wolverine. And it is bringing much of original cast back for Avengers: Doomsday, which is shooting this summer ahead of a release next year.

The Schreier choice is a confirmation of a successful relationship, showing Marvel it is happy with his work on Thunderbolts. The studio likes to work with filmmakers with which it finds itself in sympatico, be it Jon Watts on the Spider-Man movies (Watts and Schreier also happen to share the same CAA agent), Daniel Destin Cretton or Joe and Anthony Russo. Thunderbolts opened to a solid $74.3 million but more importantly, scored strong audience exit scores and strong reviews, helping Marvel turn a downward slide in the opposite direction.

Scheier is additionally repped by Untitled Entertainment.