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. “Just forget about X-3. And the first Wolverine [Origins]? Forget about that too,” she laughingly said during a red-carpet interview in 2014.
“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. 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.”
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. (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. Mom, Ladyhawke, St. 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. Though she didn’t grow up with the characters, the seasoned storyteller could smell potential; long before Marvel Studios launched, Shuler Donner alongside Avi Arad and Stan Lee, helped Twentieth Century Fox lock down an entire multiverse of mutants. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hadn’t even slung his first web for Sony Pictures when Shuler Donner, director Bryan Singer, and Fox took a big gamble on a pair of British thespians and an unknown Australian actor to lead 2000’s X-Men. “We thought, ‘That’s it, we’ll never work again,‘ ” Shuler Donner has said. But that gamble paid off—big time.