Fox has done a good job of beating the life out of most serious X-Men fans. You can thank the travesty of X3 for that. Unfortunately, they still have the casual fans ready to show up. You know, the people who show up to anything that looks like it might be a superhero movie. These are also the same people who haven’t figured out yet that just because a movie is computer animated doesn’t mean it will be good. Those people will probably eat this idea up, but for the rest of us prepare to want to throw up.

In an interview with Cinematical, X2 and X3 writer Zak Penn revealed that he’s in talks to direct a young X-Men film. It’s a spin-off, an X-Kids movie, and it doesn’t sound like by that he means it’s going to be about Iceman and Rogue. Besides, isn’t Anna Paquin like 50 by now? She’s been 18 for at least three decades. The only good news here is that it’s so far off, if we’re lucky it’ll get stuck in development hell. Penn says, “I still have to talk to Fox, set the story down ... and then it will take a year -- maybe two years -- to get together. Put it this way, if you agree to do one of the X-Men movies, it could end up happening four or five years down the line. Which is fine with me; it's just not my focus right now.”

We should have seen this coming. Fox has always hated the X-Men movies, and so now they’re trying to turn them into the Fast and the Furious by making them younger and hotter. We already have that impending Magneto spin-off doing it. You know, the one that won’t have Ian McKellan or Patrick Stewart but will have some hot, young actor ruining their characters. Hugh Jackman had better get cracking on that Wolverine spin off before they replace him with Channing Tatum.