November 23, 2024

XMF • the SUPER

Celebrating The Continuing Legacy Of X-Men Films • Covering Our Most-Anticipated Genre Film And TV Projects

Christopher McQuarrie on expanding the ‘X-Men’ universe & his ‘Wolverine’ script.

X-Men Cast

While Mark Millar is busy creating connections between THE WOLVERINE, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST and the upcoming FANTASTIC FOUR REBOOT, Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie went on record saying that he was, at one point, interested in creating a “Bible” of sorts to help guide the X-Men films towards a larger shared universe. The writer, who wrote the initial script for THE WOLVERINE in 2009, recently told Screen Rant about his previous efforts to do what is being done now.

“You know, Bryan [Singer] and I have talked about it a bunch of times – in fact, right after I got back from shooting [Jack Reacher] I had a meeting with Tom Rothman – just a general meeting – and I said to Tom, ‘You know what I’d really love to do, is I’d really love to flesh out the X-Men Universe for you.” said McQuarrie. “You have this great wealth of these Marvel characters, and the X-Men franchise has only focused on a small handful of them – there’s many more.’

“And I thought that it’d be really cool to create a ‘bible’ – you know, a series of outlines of interlocking movies where you could do kind of what they did with ‘The Avengers,’ where you’re creating multiple movies that could come together as one movie here and there. And… you know… I never heard back [laughs]. But that would kinda be fun – to do something like that – where you could kind of become the curator for something like that.”

Update: McQuarrie commented on what his initial script was like for THE WOLVERINE. After Darren Aronofsky left the project, the script went under a rewrite by Mark Bomback. It’s unknown how much of the original is left in the final version.

“It was an X-Men movie – it was a Marvel movie – but it existed very much in a real world.” said McQuarrie. “And more than anything, I love it for the very fact that – at least in the script I wrote – he was the only mutant in the movie. It was what you’d imagine the Wolverine universe to be under the control of somebody who wrote ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘The Way of the Gun’ and is a fan of Sergio Leone. It was Kurosawa’s Wolverine. There was a real romance to it, there was real humor to it, and a very straightforward sort of plain-faced brutality to it. I’m hoping they preserve that.”