Bryan Singer: "I Just Signed A Deal To Do An X-Men First Class Origins Picture"

No need to beat around the bush with this one: on the blue carpet for Avatar's LA premiere earlier this evening, Bryan Singer offered up a tiny little detail about his follow-up to Jack the Giant Killer. He says he's signed to return to the X-Men franchise, for the film that will now presumably be called X-Men Origins: First Class.

Flickchart mentioned Singer's statement on Twitter, and it only took a few moments of combing through Ustream's archive of the live blue carpet video feed to find the brief interview with Singer. What he says, exactly, when asked about his next project is:

I'm prepping up to do a movie called Jack the Giant Killer [at] Warner Brothers, and I just yesterday signed a deal to do an X-Men First Class Origins picture, which is kind of cool.

Here's the video:

This isn't entirely a surprise, as Singer has talked about returning to the X-Men franchise as recently as this past October "I'm still looking to possibly returning to the 'X-Men' franchise. I've been talking to Fox about it. I love Hugh Jackman. I love the cast," he said then. He's also said he was considering directing First Class. Seems unlikely that he'll get to work with Jackman much in this one, however, as the film is meant to cover the team of X-Men prior to Wolverine's arrival in the first film.

Lauren Shuler Donner has said "the movie focuses on the first class at Xavier's school of the gifted, so only those mutants will be featured in the first movie," by which she evidently means that we'll see the early days of the original X-Men team. In April of this year, she described it like so:

So it's young Scott, young Jean, young Beast and that'll be really fun. I think (the plan) is to follow some of the characters into their own stories, and weave them back into the X-Men world. And hopefully First Class will become its own franchise and we can follow them as they grow up.