Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, the Free Willy franchise, and You’ve Got Mail, someone in Donner’s office put the X-Men comics in front of her. (She’s fond of mentioning that she gave Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige his first job, as her intern.) But after a string of hits in the 80s and 90s, like Mr. Shuler Donner already had a successful, multi-decade career as a producer in Hollywood before Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Children was even a glint in her eye. The producer says this brave new Charles-and-Erik-less world is “both liberating and makes me nervous-it’s mostly liberating.” Charles and Erik are “always essential” to X-Men-but, she admits, “there are other stories to tell.” “We cannot, once again, explore the Erik/Charles dynamic,” Shuler Donner said in a late-February conversation with Vanity Fair, about the intense frenemyship between Magneto and Professor X that has driven the bulk of the franchise over the past 17 years. Less than a year after the critically panned X-Men: Apocalypse, the ever-evolving mutants have officially gotten their groove back-and without the two central characters who have gotten them this far. Deadpool smashed box-office expectations last year and earned actual Oscar buzz the first X-Men live-action TV show, Legion, and the latest Wolverine installment, Logan, are currently garnering rave reviews. And the first Wolverine ? Forget about that too,” she laughingly said during a red-carpet interview in 2014.īut a lot can change quickly in this superhero-clogged landscape, and the X-Men-who were once lagging a bit behind the Avengers and the Justice League-are currently on a roll. Lauren Shuler Donner, the producer who helped Twentieth Century Fox snap up the film rights to the X-Men characters 23 years ago, is the first to admit that her very financially lucrative franchise has had a few creative rough patches.

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