As most of you know by know, David Goyer is hard at work trying to bring a Magneto (the bad guy from X-Men) spin-off movie to the big screen. He is currently scouting locations and trying to develop a budget that the studio will green light. Not sure how much they’ll be willing to fork over on a project like this.
Anyway, my friend Matt over at Obsessed With Film emailed me the following information about some possible plot details regarding the upcoming project that they’ve got up on their site. Some juicy stuff:
The movie is book-ended with two scenes in Poland at the 60th Anniversary of the Auschwitz Liberation. These events take place within the timeframe of the first three X-films and will reunite Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. The opening takes a cue from Bryan Singer’s X-Men, where a young Erik Lehnsherr crumples the Auschwitz gates. Erik is subjected to horrendous experiments by a team of scientists led by vicious Nazi Dr. Kleinmein. We next meet Lehnsherr in Ukraine. It’s ten years later and he’s married to Magda, they have a young girl called Anya. Erik works in construction, his abilities are well developed, he’s able to plunge a nail straight through wood by just staring at it.
In the village pub Erik spots Kirken, an abusive prison guard from the concentration camp. Kirken ends up dead by Erik’s hand and the villagers burn down his house – Magda and Anya are killed in the blaze. In Paris, Erik seeks help from famed Nazi hunter Professor Wesenthein – he wants revenge, more specifically he’s looking for Kleinmein. Wesenthein tells Erik many Nazi’s are hiding out on South America, and that Kleinmein was trying to genetically manufacture a master race for Hitler. Erik moves on to Argentina to try and track down Nazi war criminals – he’s met by CIA agent Owen Graves and the pair fore an alliance. Graves tips off Erik on the whereabouts of known Nazis but also harbours his own agenda.
The action switches to Israel where Erik searches for a man well known for helping Holocaust survivors. He finds him playing soccer: Dr Charles Xavier
Now this sounds fan-frigging-tastic. It almost has a bit of a Hanibal feel to it (in a good way though). The character of Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (aka Magneto) is one of the deepest, most complex, rich and fascinating in literature (not just comics). He is misunderstood, conflicted, driven by a powerful force to do what he thinks is good, that often leads him to unspeakable evil. He is a scholar, an intellectual, a warrior… and someone you just plain don’t fuck with. An outline like this sounds like it would be more of a character film than a special effects film… and that’s just the sort of movie that “Magneto” needs to me in my opinion.
It does raise the question about who should play Eric. OWF raises a good point that the studio would pretty much NEED to put in a big name to draw in the mainstream audience. I usually prefer no-names for comic characters… but I agree that a name will probably be needed here.
