‘X-Force’ Movie Writer Talks Story, Characters & Rating

ScreenRant: Jeff Wadlow is a man on the verge. The writer/director behind films like Cry_Wolf and Never Back Down is tackling both writing and directing duties on his most high-profile project yet, this summer’s superhero sequel, Kick-Ass 2. He’ll follow that tough act by taking a page from Kick-Ass 1 writer/director Matthew Vaughn and jumping into Fox’s X-Men universe, writing (and potentially directing?) the studio’s recently-announced X-Force movie.

SR: For the average person who maybe doesn’t know: What differentiates X-Force from X-Men?

Jeff Wadlow: What ‘X-Force’ is – the way I talk about ‘X-Force’ is… ‘X-Men’ is about mutants, and not all the mutants get into the mansion. So I’m curious to tell a story about the mutants who don’t make it into the mansion.

We’ve heard that you may be working from different iterations of the X-Force team [that have existed in the comic books] – can you tell us who some of your favorite characters are?

I definitely can’t tell you the lineup – we want that to be a big surprise.

Well who are some YOUR favorites, like personally speaking.

Look, I’m a huge Deadpool fan, who doesn’t love Wolverine – but obviously Cable is an iconic character we haven’t seen onscreen yet. I love Psylocke, Domino is an amazing character – it’s a long list of characters that have appeared in ‘X-Force’ – Colossus is in the current lineup… There’s a lot of really exciting characters that you can use in ‘X-Force’ that have been in other movies, that haven’t shown up, or maybe there’s ways to re-imagine them, even though they might’ve shown up in other films.

Are you being given free reign to pick the characters you want – or does the studio have their own ideas of who they want? What’s the balance there?

Basically when they hired Mark [Millar] to oversee their Marvel properties, he started talking about some characters they were thinking about doing solo films with – that could maybe then lead to a team movie - sort of following the Marvel/’Avengers’ model. And I said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, that’s not what’s cool about X-Men! Marvel’s doing individuals who become a team; this should be about, like, other teams, and I want to make an ‘X-Force’ movie, and this is how I would do it.’ And I pitched him the idea, he got real excited and gave me some great notes that I incorporated, we took it into the studio, I pitched them, they loved it and they said ‘Let’s do it.’

After doing something like Kick-Ass 2, would your X-Force movie be PG-13 or R-Rated?

At this point, to be honest, there’s a lot of external issues that go into answering that question. Depends on the budget of the movie – if I wanted to make a smaller-budget film then the argument for allowing me to make an R-rated film becomes more compelling. Like ‘Kick-Ass 2,’ we made that for $28 million so that could be ‘R’; you make a movie for $200 million it can’t be ‘R.’ That’s just the economics of the movie business. So I think it depends on the scope of the final film – but we’ll see. [Smiles]

For X-Force, what kind of villain would you put them up against?

[Smiles Coyly] I can’t say at this point. I can’t say.