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Bryan Singer: An ‘X-Men: First Class’ sequel could be set in Vietnam, or amid the civil rights movement

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As ‘X-Men: First Class’ completes nearly a week of release, thoughts wander, well, much further ahead, all the way to a sequel.

Though they’re not confirming any new development, executives at studio Fox have certainly hoped that the movie’s performance warrants a new installment. Like every big Hollywood company these days, Fox craves a franchise, and young actors such as Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy were cast at least in part so they can grow with the series.

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The plot of Matthew Vaughn’s movie -- which tells of the origins of the mutant superhero group against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- does pave the way for a follow-up. [Minor spoiler alert: Please skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’d like to avoid finding out details]. It ends in a time when the tension between mutants and humans has only just begun, and the franchise’s main relationship between Dr. Charles Xavier and Magneto has yet to harden into archrivalry.

But even if ‘First Class’ turns into an international smash, picking up the trail could be tricky. Once you’ve gone back and shown where a group like the X-Men came from, it’s an open question how much mileage you can get from continuing to show where they came from.

Then again, prequels can come in bunches -- ‘Star Wars: The Phantom Menace’ was followed by two more. And ‘X-Men’ does offer some juicy possibilities.

Producer Bryan Singer, at least, has a few ideas about where the franchise could go from here.

In an interview last week, the filmmaker who conceived of the new film told 24 Frames that he sees future installments tracking the evolution of the mutants as they navigate -- or even offer parables about -- 20th century America.

‘I don’t know if every movie has to be a history lesson. But there’s a lot of history to cover. If we sequelized this, it could inhabit a whole world of the 20th century,’ he said. ‘When [‘First Class’] happened, Kennedy had not been assassinated and the Vietnam War hadn’t happened yet.’

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Nor, he said, would it need to deal just with military matters. ‘What’s really interesting about the ‘60s setting is the civil rights movement,’ he said.

The filmmaker noted that the principal ‘First Class’ characters of Magneto and Xavier -- who respectively advocate for armed struggle and peaceful co-existence -- lend themselves to the real-world struggle for racial equality. ‘What’s fascinating about these two characters is that they’re really the Malcolm X and Martin Luther King of comic mythology,’ he said.

Singer is aware of the dangers of overdoing a franchise. Of the third X-Men movie, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand,’ which he was involved with only early on, he said, ‘Some things worked. I’m not sure all of it worked.’ And he believes the 2009 spinoff ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine,’ with which he was not involved, had its issues. ‘’Wolverine’ told a story, but it didn’t always feel like a story that was very essential or interesting.’

But he embraced the idea of moving forward with a sixth ‘X-Men’ film, especially if it meant the chance to continue weaving in real-world events. ‘You don’t need to hit people over the head with them in every movie or every scene,’ he said. ‘But having them at the core of the conflict is what I think makes it all work.’

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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