Mike Dougherty, director of the long-delayed and mistreated Trick ‘r Treat and co-writer of X-Men 2 joined the /Filmcast over the weekend and in their special “After Dark” segment, where they talk about whatever’s on their mind, their conversation hit on the interesting subject of X-Men 3, for which Dougherty and Singer were not a part of, but would have been had Singer not swung over to DC to make Superman Returns (for which Dougherty helped write).

In the audio clip, Dave Chen, Adam Quigley and Devindra Hardawar bring up the subject the X3 and quiz Dougherty on his thoughts of the movie, for which he answered reservedly and professionally. The interesting parts however, came afterward, when Dougherty moved on to explain some of the ideas he pitched to Bryan Singer for what of been their version of the third installment of the X-Men film franchise.

This is one of those ideas I’d say is very bad but at the same time, it’s pretty damn cool.

Everett Bradford put up a YouTube video to demonstrate what he calls “The Prometheus Device” and since then, it’s been popping up on geek and tech sites all over the web.

The device emulates what we see from the character of Pyro in X-Men 3: The Last Stand, sans his power to manipulate the fire once launching it out of his palm. Check out the demo video for the neat-but-incredibly-dangerous device below.

A few days back, we put up part one of “The Next X-Men Films” series, our look into the future of Fox Studio’s growing and financially successful movie series based on Marvel’s mighty mutants. This was based on quotes from Empire’s recent feature on Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of all films X-Men related, and today we’ll look at the other two anticipated films she spoke about.

In Part One we discussed Wolverine 2, the most-likely-to-happen solo flick out of Fox’s development slate as well as X-Men: First Class, the prequel to Bryan Singer’s first X-Men which is currently in its writing stages with Josh Schwartz penning the script.

Now, it’s time to look at two other popular character solo movies that are in early stages of development: Deadpool and X-Men Origins: Magneto. One of these is likely to happen, one may not.

The folks at Empire had a chance to speak with Lauren Shuler Donner, producer of all films X-Men related, at the press junket for the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on Blu-ray and they discussed the future of the franchise.

The feature that Empire put together on the interview was broken down into four sections for each of the movies: Wolverine 2, X-Men: First Class, Deadpool, and Magneto. We’ll go through and discuss each, passing to you the key things Donner says and giving our thoughts on it and how it relates to what we expected to see from these movies since their inception.

To start, here’s the latest on Wolverine 2 and X-Men: First Class…

There’s been plenty of talk about the future of the X-Men franchise in recent times leading up to and after the financial success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to kick off the summer of 2009. That hefty $85 million opening weekend helped push a Deadpool spin-off for Ryan Reynolds into motion as well as the early development of other spin-offs, prequels and even a sequel to the X-Men trilogy. That’s right, an X-Men 4 is in the early stages of planning.

In addition to the speculation of future installments to the franchise, there’s been buzz about the return of one of the folks responsible for helping kickstart the live-action series of X-Men films, Bryan Singer. We know that he’s interested and that X-producer Lauren Shuler Donner is too. But just how realistic is it?

As of this morning, it seems much more likely that this will come to fruition…

The news the other day about producer Lauren Schuler Donner hinting at the beginnings of plans for an X-Men 4 movie (and a movie based on The New Mutants) got me thinking of some of the infinite possibilities for the next X-Men installment.

I could go on and on about stories and characters I’d like to see, but keeping to the basics, I’ll discuss some of the issues from the existing X-trilogy that need to be rectified going forward with the next movie, should it come to fruition.

Join us as we discuss what we’d like to see from X-Men 4 and open the floor for your ideas!

Rob Liefeld, the creator of the Deadpool character of Marvel comics was twitter-happy last night, updating fans about some news regarding the upcoming Fox Studios film, X-Men Origins: Deadpool.

He started by mentioning that he’s on his way to a big meeting about the Deadpool movie and then his following four tweets got interesting, making some needed confirmations and suggesting some cool stuff we may see down the road.

In a move the reeks of opportunism and greed, Jack Kirby’s Estate (a.k.a. his family) have hired Intellectual Property Lawyer Marc Toberoff to sue Disney/Marvel, Sony, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures in an attempt to reclaim copyright ownership of the characters their late father Jacob Kurtzberg created. You may know his name better as Jack Kirby and you are most familiar with his iconic and highly popular comic book creations, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk and The Silver Surfer.

Thanks to the guys over /Film for sharing this with us and to Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool and Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywod who seem to have gotten the drop on this breaking news. This is not the first lawsuit we’ve seen involving a comic book creator’s estate vs. the current owner and publisher; Just recently we reported and discussed WB/DC’s fight with the heirs of Jerry Siegel and Jerry Schuster over the rights to Superman.

The X-Men franchise has a bright future on the silver screen. With multiple projects in their early stages of development and several given the greenlight after the financial success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine to kick off this summer, there seems to be no end in sight for what the future may hold of Fox Studio’s hot property.

I’ll bet Disney wishes they could have picked up this film license in their acquisition of Marvel…

Aside from solo films for Magneto and Deadpool, and the prequel team-up film X-Men: First Class, we might be getting a movie based on the New Mutants comic line and… a possible X-Men 4?

Have you ever wanted to look deep into the dark recesses of a comic book movie director’s mind – nay – heart? You don’t have to look much further than the interview StarPulse.com recently held with director Brett Ratner. The Q&A session was mostly a junket to build hype for Ratner’s upcoming film The Shooter Series, but also touched on Beverly Hills Cop 4 and his thoughts on comic book fans, and it’s that last part I want to focus on.

There are sites out there (that we are most certainly friends with and fans of) that regularly rip Ratner and his films a new one. So I’m going to preface this article by saying that if you search Screen Rant you’ll find that while we may not be his biggest fans, we haven’t jumped on the “‘Brett Ratner sucks’ bandwagon” in our coverage of him or his films.

Okay, X-Men: The Last Stand wasn’t good. Considering how great the first two films were, the third was woeful in comparison. While most people tend to blame Brett Ratner, I blame the suits at Fox.

Ratner isn’t a bad director, in fact I quite like him, he knows how to make a good popcorn flick, and his stab at a Hannibal Lecter film was much better than Ridley Scott’s. Yes, you did read that correctly.

The Last Stand was ruined by a release date and Fox’s wish stick a finger up at Bryan Singer, who bailed from the franchise to direct Superman Returns (a film that I really like).

Now that the money grabbers at Fox have realized that it’s just too expensive to continue with the X-Men franchise in its original incarnation, they’ve apparently decided to milk the cash cow my going straight to DVD with a series of origin films.

I haven’t updated news on the upcoming Wolverine movie because really there hasn’t been too terribly much to talk about. Now a few things have piled up so here’s a summary of where things stand at the moment…

Here’s a grab bag of news items for you today:

A couple of clips from Hostel: Part II. At least in the second clip there’s a reason the girl running through the woods falls down. MTV Movies Blog

The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk will only be 9 feet tall and will not get any bigger than that. Superherohype

According to ShowBizSpy.com, Josh Holloway, who lately has been playing the “kinder and gentler” conman Sawyer on ABC’s Lost has stated he’s been approached by Fox to play the part of Gambit in X-Men 4.

If this is in fact true, then it confirms that despite the studio announcing that they were done making Click to continue "X-Men 4 With Lost Star As Gambit?"

According to Superherohype.com, after having won the People’s Choice Award for “Favorite Female Action Star” Halle Berry was so pleased that fans like her “Storm” character so much that she told them if they really want X-Men 4 to be made, it’s up to them.

Here’s what she said:

“You guys really love X-Men? Ok, here’s what you have to do. Write letters. Every one of you in this building who love X-Men and want to see X-Men 4, write a letter to Tom Rothman at Fox and tell him so and you will get another one, and I’ll be there too.”