'The Wolverine' Scribe Christopher McQuarrie Pitched Fox On Curating Their X-Men Universe

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by Charlie Schmidlin
December 19, 2012 9:05 AM
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Given Oscar-winning screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie's duties on “The Wolverine” -- a gig that stuck even after Darren Aronofsky's departure from the director's chair last year -- it would make sense that in 20^th Century Fox's aims toward building a consistent franchise, discussions between McQuarrie and “X-Men: Days of Future Past” director Bryan Singer would occur. And according to the director, that's exactly what transpired, with some surprising additional results.

In a recent junket where he was promoting directorial effort “Jack Reacher,” McQuarrie told Screen Rant he and Bryan “have talked about it a bunch of times,” and went on to describe a meeting taken with [ex-Fox exec] Tom Rothman regarding their prize franchise. He apparently told Rothman, “I'd really love to flesh out the X-Men Universe for you. 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.”

McQuarrie continued, “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.”

Alas, he claims he “never heard back” from Rothman or anyone regarding the meeting, but with a number of great successes and structural talent (“The Usual Suspects”) behind him, he would be quite a fitting choice. But Fox has tossed their lot in with Mark Millar as their creative consultant, so presumably that's all under his mandate now. But we'll see McQuarrie's contributions when “The Wolverine” opens on July 26, 2013.

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