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Lauren Shuler Donner Wants X-Men: First Class To Be Dark & Funny

by Alex Billington
October 17, 2009
Source: Empire

We've heard plenty before from producer Lauren Shuler Donner about what to expect for every X-Men movie coming up and other Marvel projects like Wolverine 2 and Deadpool. So at first glance, I wasn't too excited by what she had to say to Empire this time. Then I came across her quotes on X-Men: First Class which seemed to address my exact concerns expressed in some recent articles. Basically she says they want First Class to "not be a kiddie movie" but instead be darker and funny, like the recent Harry Potter movies. Of course, with the most recent one making over $300 million, everyone wants to be like that. Read on!

Before we get to First Class, Shuler Donner first talked briefly about the in-development Wolverine 2:

"It's actually the story we wanted to use for the first Wolverine film, but [Fox head honcho] Tom Rothman preferred to set the character up with an origin story first. What's cool about this part of the saga is that Wolverine will be fighting in a different style to what we've seen before. Mariko's father has this stick-like weapon, so Wolverine will have to fight against that. There'll be samurai, ninja, katana blades, different forms of martial arts — mano-a-mano, extreme fighting."

Actually sounds pretty awesome. Now on to First Class, here's what she had to say about this project:

"We want it to be like the recent, darker Potters. It should not be a kiddie movie: we're in the X-Men world so you can't suddenly change the tone. The First Class comics are really fun — they're funnier than any other comics I've read. Basically in each one the kids are fighting strange villains, sometimes it's aliens, sometimes it's monsters. I want to get a [taste] of that world."

She also went on to talk about how they're not concerned that Ryan Reynolds is playing both Green Lantern and Deadpool, saying that Harrison Ford was in both Star Wars and Indiana Jones at the same time as well. On Deadpool: "Wade Wilson is a bad ass, a wise-cracking mercenary, who will go out and kill anyone for money." And that's why I'm excited to see that movie get made, as long as they find a damn good director who won't screw it up (we don't want another Punisher). I like what she has to say about all of these, but she's a producer and it's her job to sell them, it's just a matter of if they actually turn out that way in the end.

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