'Deadpool 2' confirmed with Ryan Reynolds and original team

Hey, remember five years ago, when the X-Men producers imagined a future with a million X-Men movies? What a laugh we all had! Surely no major studio would ever greenlight a hard-R Deadpool movie. Surely Gambit would never be a thing, never.

We were wrong, dead wrong! With Deadpool now the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, Fox came to CinemaCon with some news about the future of its Marvel franchise. The studio officially announced that Ryan Reynolds would reteam with director Tim Miller and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick for Deadpool 2 — a no-brainer, given the film’s grosses (more than $757 million worldwide).

The studio also showed off a new trailer for next month’s X-Men: Apocalypse. The preview revealed a couple of intriguing key story points. First off — POSSIBLE SPOILER FOR A TRAILER THAT WILL BE RELEASED ONLINE SOON, WHAT WORLD DO WE LIVE IN — Apocalypse appears to confirm, once and for all, that Days of Future Past breakout Quicksilver is indeed the son of Michael Fassbender’s Magneto. (“Him and my mom did it,” is how Evan Peters’ Quicksilver explains it in the film.)

More intriguing is Mystique’s role in Apocalypse. Comic book fans have watched, with bemusement, as the blue-skinned shapeshifter has risen to major prominence in the movie franchise — she was literally the most important mutant in the world in the plot of Future Past. In Apocalypse, Jennifer Lawrence’s rebel mutant appears to assume a leadership role, teaching a new generation of mutants how to be superheroes. Apocalypse takes place a decade on from Future Past, and the trailer makes it clear that Mystique has become something of a legend among younger X-Men like Nightcrawler and Jean Grey.

Fox did not reveal any information about next year’s Wolverine film — a title card for the movie simply called it “Untitled Wolverine.” And, perhaps most notably of all, Fox did not even mention Gambit, the Channing Tatum-fronted X-Men spinoff. Gambit was originally scheduled to arrive in October of this year, but the movie has been delayed (and shuffled directors). In Fox’s closing rundown of its 2017 lineup, the studio only promised a “Fox Marvel Project.” That could be Gambit, or it could be a rushed Deadpool 2. (It’s probably not X-Statix, even though we badly need X-Statix in our lives now.)

In conclusion: More X-Men, coming always.