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23rd Apr 2017

Deadpool 2 and a surprise new X-Men movie have confirmed their 2018 release dates

Rory Cashin

Having made $783 million from a $58 million budget, it wasn’t so much a case of “if we get another Deadpool movie”, but “when are we getting another Deadpool movie”?

While Deadpool is part of the Marvel comic universe, he isn’t (at the moment) part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as the rights to character are owned by 20th Century Fox, as opposed to Disney who have creative control over The Avengers and co.

Fox were also responsible for the recent Logan ($603 million from a $97 million budget), so they’ve been on a bit of a roll when it comes to making grown-up adaptations of the comic book material.

Maybe it was in response to the critical mauling the recent Fantastic Four got, or the worldwide shrug when X-Men: Apocalypse arrived, but whatever the lesson was, it looks like they’ve learned it.

This weekend they announced their upcoming schedule – which also included the next FOUR Avatar movies – and their biggie was Deadpool arriving on 1 June 2018.

With the co-director of John Wick behind the camera, and Josh Brolin confirmed to play his best frenemy Cable, we’ve already been given a quick glimpse of what to expect and we’re finding it very difficult to maintain a realistic expectation.

Clip via Ryan Reynolds

But that wasn’t all the superhero-related released that Fox had up their sleeve.

They also announced the release date of X-Men: The New Mutants (13 April 2018), set to be directed by Josh Boone (The Fault In Our Stars). There’s not a lot of info on this one yet, but we’re guessing it’ll involve a much younger group of superheroes than we’re used to seeing in the X-Men team.

And finally, there’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Again, all rumour, but it may be following up on the story set-up by X-Men: Apocalypse in which a young Jean Grey (played this time by Game Of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) unleashes the full potential of her abilities, to world-ending effect.

The Dark Phoenix storyline is one of the best within the X-Men comic book universe, but the X-Men movies attempted it once before with X-Men: The Last Stand, and completely messed it up, so here’s hoping they get it right this time.

No word on a director yet, but the strong rumour is that it will mark the debut of Simon Kinberg, the writer of X-Men: Days Of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse. Unfortunately, he was also the writer of X-Men: The Last Stand, so we’re not sure how excited or hesitant to feel about it.

We’ll know for sure when it comes out on 2 November 2018.

So that’s three more comic book movies to add to 2018’s slate, which already had Black Panther (16 Feb), Avengers: Infinity War (4 May), Ant-Man And The Wasp (6 July), Venom (5 October) and Aquaman (21 December).