Fox has long been hot to get young with its X-Men franchise, in fact that’s just what they’re doing with Magneto, whenever his solo movie finally gets around to being done. Now they’re doing it with the rest of Professor X’s students and giving us a look at their teenage days with a movie called X-Men: First Class.

Variety says they’ve hired Josh Schwartz, last seen creating teen friendly shows like The OC and the more recently geek friendly Chuck, to write it. Looks like Fox has both of their demos covered. They want to “inject a next-gen sensibility” into the superhero series which probably means taking a page from what Paramount is doing to Star Trek and make everything look like an iPod. Schwartz is probably the right guy to do it. Whether he’ll also make a good movie in addition to churning out great product placement, is anyone’s guess. Judging from what happened with X-Men 3, somehow I doubt anyone cares cares.

There is some precedent for getting younger with these characters. Marvel Comics has long feature a number of different comic properties focused on teenage mutants. In fact, there’s even been one called “X-Men: First Class”. The comic had a run in 2006 and 2007, and told the story of familiars like Cyclops, Beast, Gambit, Jean Grey, and Iceman as youngsters learning what it means to be X-Men at the feet of Professor Xavier.