Jordan Peele apparently opted not to take up an offer to join the MCU, and it turns out it was X-Men that was put before him.
There was a story floating around earlier this week that claimed Jordan Peele had been in discussions with Marvel Studios about directing one of its upcoming projects. However, at that point we were missing the juiciest detail of all, that being the project in question.
Even though the offer was reportedly declined by Peele, the story led to plenty of speculation regarding which project the Get Out filmmaker had been offered, with Marvel’s troubled Blade being a popular choice, even though that production already has a director (or at least we think it does), Yann Demange.
A fresh story has now surfaced to corroborate the original story, claiming that Peele met with Marvel – although this story adds that “it was a long time ago” and “it didn’t work out”.
The report (via One Take News) adds that the project in question was X-Men, which makes a lot of sense from Marvel Studios’ perspective given that it’s one of the company’s highest-profile titles and Peele is one of the industry’s most respected directors.
If Peele took the meeting with Marvel then there must have some degree of interest on his part, even if the filmmaker seems to prefer making original films.
The report adds that Peele wanted to rewrite X-Men himself but Marvel didn’t agree to this. The studio has recently announced the hiring of Michael Lesslie as the writer behind the new movie, but no director has been announced as of yet.
If true (and the report does state that it was unable to fully confirm the claims of its source), more than anything else it highlights the interesting position that Jordan Peele is in right now. Nope was this writer’s film of 2022, but although it made a profit for Universal, the film earned considerably less than his previous two films, Get Out and Us.
Given the strong critical responses to all of these films, we’d hope that would give Peele the continued clout to continue making the kind of expensive, creative and individual films that are the hallmark of his style. Still, despite already suffering one major delay, we’ve heard nothing regarding the status of his next project, even though the production was supposed to be getting underway this summer.
Is Jordan Peele at a point where he might need to take an IP-driven film in a ‘one for me, one for them’ style approach? We’ve seen other talented filmmakers face similar choices. Greta Gerwig has started down the franchise path, first with Barbie and then with a brace of planned Narnia films for Netflix, whereas Damien Chazelle has scaled down his budget for his next film – a prison movie – after the troubles of his expensively-staged epic, Babylon.
Time of course, will tell. We’re hoping that we soon hear news that Peele’s next project for Universal is entering production, and will keep you posted. Just in case the rest of the internet forgets to.
