Zak Penn Talks Young X-Men Spin-Off

Zak Penn gets a lot of credit for being one of the writers on Bryan Singer's X2, which many consider to be one of the best comic book adaptations of all time. But truth be told, he's written a lot of crap, including the Elektra movie and X-Men: The Last Stand. But people seem to have their blinders up, and all they see is his X2 credit. But I still remember that he was responsible for Last Action Hero.

After Bryan Singer dropped out from directing X-Men: The Last Stand, Fox was in discussions with Penn about helming the project. The studio eventually went to an even worse director (Brett Ratner) with a bigger resume. Penn reveals to Cinematical that he had since been contracted to work on an young X-Men spin-off.

"I had been attached to direct one of the [X-Men] spin-offs; in fact, I'm in discussions about that now," said Penn. "The original idea was to have me do a young X-Men spin-off, a spin-off of the young X-Men characters. But someone came up with a pretty interesting idea which I can't discuss. I was pretty taken by it, as was the studio. I have to give him credit, it was this guy who worked with me named Mike Chamoy — he worked a lot with me on X3. He came up with how to do a young X-Men movie which is not what you'd expect."

When can we expect this young X-Men flick?

"We'll see; I still have to talk to Fox, set the story down ... and then it will take a year — maybe two years — to get together. Put it this way, if you agree to do one of the X-Men movies, it could end up happening four or five years down the line."

It would obviously be very difficult to make another X-Men film with the original characters, due to actor contract costs. A young X-Men concept might be the only way to go, but what kind of spin could Penn and Chamoy put on that story? And would the resulting film be better than Elektra? We hope so.