Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier might graduate up to X-Men

Because every blockbuster franchise hit is really just a job interview for the next one.

By William Hughes | May 8, 2025 | 7:06pm

Photo: Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney

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Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier might graduate up to X-Men

It’s an unavoidable truth of franchise-loving Hollywood that most every movie—even ones that cost like $180 million to make!—is, on some level, a job interview for the next movie. This just keeps going and going, until you make the biggest movie in the history of the world, are celebrated wildly and given a blank check to pursue your passion projects, and then somehow we end up with Citadel. Scroll back to much earlier on the timeline, though, and we start getting reports like this: Deadline announcing that Jake Schreier, whose Thunderbolts* is currently building a reputation as “the first good one in a minute” among Marvel fans, is reportedly in talks to maybe make an X-Men movie.

This is all, obviously, in the “nobody’s going to comment on the record” phase, but Schreier is supposedly now the “top choice” to helm the film, which was reportedly written by Michael Lesslie. Outside of the animated X-Men ’97, Marvel’s been taking a very slow path to using the X-Men characters since it acquired the rights to the team back in 2019: Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and (in a post-credits scene) Kelsey Grammer have all popped up in MCU films, but there’s been no formal X presence to speak of. (The studio has seemed much more interested in getting the Fantastic Four up and running before turning to the thorny question of mutants.) Schreier is reportedly a big fan of the team, though, and given that Thunderbolts is getting strong reviews from critics, good word of mouth, and a solid showing at the box office, he’s apparently earned the chance to make his case to be the guy to formally introduce them to the MCU as a group.