Simon Kinberg on original cast in X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, and GAMBIT spin-off.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST writer and producer, Simon Kinberg spoke with The Daily Beast about the end credits stinger for X-MEN: APOCALYPSE and reveals that the follow up will feature some of the original trilogy cast.

“It will focus primarily on the FIRST CLASS cast, but it will certainly have some of the original cast involved, too,” he says. Last month, Patrick Stewart hinted at playing Professor Xavier again in the future, saying “There might be something else. A little bird has whispered that there might be something X-Men related.”

Nice!

“At some point in making [DOFP] we talked about what the potential next film would be,” he continues, “and we all really gravitated towards Apocalypse. We really wanted [the end credit scene] to be more for the core fans than for the broad audience; to be something that was a genuine tease, and almost mysterious to mainstream audiences who don’t know the comics well, so they’re thinking, “What’s that?”

Giving an update on the developing GAMBIT spin-off, Kinberg says it’s “still in-motion and being figured out. Channing [Tatum] made it known that it was a character that he loved and would love to play, and all the people who work on the X-Men movies are huge fans of his, so the notion of him playing it is exciting. I’m more fascinated by anti-heroes, and Gambit is one of those. I don’t know why he wasn’t explored in the original X-Men movies. Maybe the reason why was because they wanted to focus on Rogue/Bobby or the platonic Rogue/Wolverine relationship, and maybe there were too many similarities between Wolverine and Gambit, so in order to make it a Wolverine-centric franchise they had to cut him loose.”