'Kick-Ass 2' Filmmaker Tackling Fox's 'X-Force' (Exclusive)

Jeff Wadlow, who is readying for the Aug. 16 release of Kick-Ass 2, has been tapped to write an adaptation of X-Force, an X-Men spinoff being developed by 20th Century Fox.

The news comes on the heels of various blogs reporting Friday that the studio registered X-ForceMovie.com a few months ago.

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Longtime X-Men franchise producer Lauren Shuler Donner is producing X-Force.

Wadlow is writing with an eye to direct.

X-Force, created by Rob Liefeld, was a spinoff from Marvel Comics flagship Uncanny X-Men released in 1991. Its first issue set records when it sold 5 million copies. (The record was surpassed later that year when X-Men No. 1, drawn by Jim Lee, sold 8 million issues.)

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The original lineup of the team comprised several characters from the first Uncanny X-Men spinoff, The New Mutants, teens who had matured into young adults. Also in the lineup was Cable, a militant leader from the future who is related to X-Men heroes Cyclops and Jean Grey. His body is enhanced by robotic parts, and he has telekinetic powers as well.

X-Force has been rebooted a couple of times in the past decade, and there are now two comics in the marketplace: Uncanny X-Force and Cable and X-Force.

Wadlow wrote and directed Kick-Ass 2, the sequel to the violent and funny 2010 hit based on the comic books by Mark Millar and John S. Romita Jr. He also recently wrote two episodes of A&E’s hit show Bates Motel.

Wadlow also is writing an adaptation of Bloodshot, based on the Valiant comic, that is set up at Sony.

He is repped by WME and Hirsch Wallerstein.

Is Fox Planning an 'X-Force' Movie? (Report)

With The Wolverine still weeks away from release and X-Men: Days of Future Past still in production, you could be forgiven for thinking that Fox currently has its hands full when it comes to the X-Men movie franchise. It appears, however, that plans are already in motion to bring a little bit of 1990s mutant magic to the big screen with a future installment.

The X-Men Films blog has noticed that Fox has registered the domain X-ForceMovie.com, noting that "this is usually how future X-Men film titles end up getting leaked" (Both X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past were leaked in this manner ahead of official announcements).

For those unfamiliar with X-Force, the concept was created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza as a replacement for the teen superhero title New Mutants, with the characters from that series re-organizing themselves into a more militaristic group led by time-traveling cyborg Cable. The first issue set a sales record for the comic book industry when released in 1991.

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Through the years, the title has been adopted by different creators for various (and varied) projects, including a satire on the concept of celebrity superheroes and a black-ops branch of the main X-Men team. Currently, the "X-Force" name is being used by two otherwise unrelated series at Marvel: Uncanny X-Force and Cable and X-Force.

With only the URL registration to go on, it's too early to hazard a guess about which version of the team a prospective movie would use, but concept creator Liefeld has long teased the idea of his Cable character appearing in a movie.

Of course, with Fox holding an X-Men movie panel at Comic-Con in San Diego next weekend, more news may be forthcoming sooner than you suspect.