Marvel Studios isn’t just looking for superheroes to lead Phase 7—they’re looking for the best storytellers in the business. In an exclusive update first reported by Collider, Thunderbolts* and X-Men director Jake Schreier has confirmed that he is bringing his heavy-hitting Beef and The Bear collaborators into the X-Mansion.
Lee Sung Jin (creator of Beef) and Joanna Calo (showrunner of The Bear) are officially working on the latest draft of the X-Men reboot script.
“We’re still developing. You know, one of the exciting things that’s tying into Beef is that Sonny [Lee Sung Jin] and Joanna [Calo] both worked on this season,” Schreuer explained . “Obviously, I mean, Beef is Sonny’s show, and Joanna worked on the season as well, and we worked together on Season 1 of Beef and on Thunderbolts*. They have come in and are working on a draft right now, which is really exciting to be able to put that group of people together again.”
Marvel has leaned into prestige TV talent lately, but this move reunites the creative trifecta that turned Beef into an Emmy-sweeping phenomenon. Schreier, confirmed that Lee Sung and Call are currently “in the room,” refining the story originally penned by Michael Lesslie (Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes).
Schreier and Calo already have MCU chemistry, having worked together on the script for Thunderbolts*. Schreier explained that Lee’s “ability to take small interpersonal dynamics and explode them into a much larger canvas” made him a perfect candidate to work on an ensemble film like X-Men. Additonally, Schreier believes that the melodrama that defined a few decades of X-Men comics plays into the strengths of the new pair of writers.
When you go back and read X-Men [comics], there’s ideology but also interpersonal drama, almost of a soap opera quality. Having writers who understand both how to drive ideology from personal stakes, if we get that right, that’s what will feel most honest to what X-Men can be.
–X-Men director Jake Schreier
For years, the complaint against the Fox X-Men movies was that they focused too much on the spectacle and not enough on the school or the family. By hiring the people responsible for two of the most intense character studies on television, Marvel is signaling that the MCU mutants will be defined by their relationships first, and their powers second.
Source: Collider
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