Thunderbolts* Director Is Perfect Choice for the X-Men

This article contains light spoilers for Thunderbolts*.

By this point, Marvel has fully spoiled the closing twist that the main team in Thunderbolts* is not in fact the Thunderbolts, but rather the New Avengers. The New Avengers aren’t the only team with a big future for Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier either. According to The Wrap, Marvel‘s looking at Schreier to adapt their much-anticipated X-Men movie, which is being written by The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes screenwriter Michael Leslie.

The news might be surprising to some. Sure, Thunderbolts* is the best-reviewed (if not quite the most popular) MCU entry in a while. But is that enough to earn Schreier a spot behind the camera on X-Men, arguably the most important superhero team in Marvel’s bullpen?

In short, yes! Schreier’s work on Thunderbolts* and projects like the Beef and even Paper Towns proves that he has the chops to handle the strangest qualities of Marvel’s Merry Mutants—namely, their messy interpersonal relationships.

An Uncanny History

Even today the general public still thinks of the X-Men as they appeared in the first few Fox movies and in the 1990s cartoon show: a collection of slick and attractive heroes with awesome powers. While they’re never not that, exactly, the X-Men are also far more complicated.

The series began as more or less a boarding school adventure created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s and transformed into a minority metaphor under the guidance of writer Chris Claremont in the 1970s and ’80s. The characters became the pinnacle of cool in the 1990s, as superstar artists such as Jim Lee gained creative control and Marvel saturated the market with all things X-related. But the X-Men have also been a vehicle for high-concept ideas, as demonstrated by Grant Morrison‘s New X-Men run in the 2000s and the recent Krakoa era, spearheaded by Jonathan Hickman.

The best X-Men stories combine all these complexities into a superhero adventure. Take Hickman’s X-Men run from 2019 to 2021. In addition to embracing the big-concept mutant metaphor by having the mutants establish their own sovereign nation of Krakoa, Hickman’s run also saw the heroes form a do-gooder team (complete with slick new costumes), wring drama from mistrust between Professor X and other mutants, and even embrace the soapy relationship fun, suggesting that the Jean-Cyclops-Wolverine love triangle had coalesced into a throuple.

For the first proper X-Men movie in the MCU, a movie that’s coming after so many retreads of the Fox X-Men era (including Avengers: Doomsday, apparently), Marvel needs to have all of these elements present. And Schreier’s the guy to do it.

Kindly Robots, Crying Teens, and Marvel’s Mutants

Swap out a few names and power sets, and it’s easy to see how Thunderbolts* could be an X-Men story. We’ve got a bunch of people who feel like misfits drawn together by a leader they may or may not trust (lest we forget, Professor Xavier is a jerk). We’ve got interpersonal drama as the team members contend with losing their self-perceptions. We’ve even got a big bad who has potential to do great good, provided he follows his better angels.

Some might object here and point out that Thunderbolts* wasn’t truly a team movie. It was mostly about Yelena and Bob, with everyone else in some degree of supporting role. But that’s not unusual for X-Men stories. Writers have often used a POV character to introduce the world the audience—usually a young woman like Jean Grey in the first comics or Rogue in Fox’s original X-Men movie. If there’s truth to the rumors that Julia Butters will play Kitty Pryde, a frequent audience surrogate in the comics, then it will probably happen again for the MCU X-Men, and Schreier’s work with Yelena proves he knows how to handle the trope.

While Thunderbolts* certainly had plenty of interpersonal conflict, it was lessened some by the fact that the team more or less had one mission, and could put aside differences to reach them. The X-Men do go on missions, but they also live together, which means that their conflicts are more ongoing.

Before Thunderbolts*, Schreier helmed several episodes of the Netflix series Beef, in which Ali Wong and Steven Yeun play regular people who let a moment of road rage spiral out of control. Beef drew a lot of its humor from the discomfort it created in viewers; but, as a dramedy, it had to keep viewers engaged and sympathetic to the characters, even when those characters did stupid things.

The fact that Schreier balanced the tone of those scenes means that he can also portray the interpersonal conflicts in X-Men. The one thing that binds the X-Men is their status as mutants, but they don’t all agree on what that status means or how much it matters. Thus you have people like Nightcrawler, who never lets his demonic appearance keep him from wooing women or practicing his faith, sharing space with Beast, who wants nothing more than to be a regular human.

As anyone who’s ever read an X-Men comic can tell you, these conflicts often get expressed in the most melodramatic terms possible. And melodrama is another place where Schreier excels. In his film debut Robot & Frank, and especially in his 2008 John Green adaptation of Paper Towns, Schreier found space for big declarations of feeling.

Those movies may not have been to everyone’s tastes, but they do have tones necessary for a good X-Men story. After all, the X-Men are rooted in stories about teenagers undergoing adolescence and their primary intended audience remains teens. Unless someone is complaining about how they’re so misunderstood or that the object of their affection doesn’t love them, then it’s not really an X-Men movie.

The Next Mutation

At this point, we need to point out that Schreier has not been officially announced as the director. It’s possible that he or Marvel may balk, and even then, it’s possible that Marvel changes direction and creative teams (see: Blade or Daredevil: Born Again). But the fact that they’re looking at a guy like Schreier proves that Marvel knows what they need to do with X-Men and knows what kind of tones they’re working with. Because when it comes to the X-Men, we don’t want a big twist. We just want to see our favorite mutants on the screen.

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