Twentieth Century Fox has announced that the sequel to X-Men: First Class, which for scheduling purposes is now known simply as "X-Men," will debut on July 18th, 2014.  The X-Men: First Class sequel, which Matthew Vaughn will direct, will begin production early next year (see "'New Mutants' Movie in the Works?").  The cast of X-Men: First Class, which includes The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence, is set to reprise their roles in the sequel.

 

Vaughn’s X-Men film will actually be Fox’s third summer tentpole for 2014. It will be preceded by Dawn of Planet of the Apes, the sequel to the highly successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which earned $483 million worldwide in 2011.  As was the case with Matthew Vaughn and the X-Men: First Class sequel, the director of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rupert Wyatt, will return to direct the encore movie. 

 

The first Fox blockbuster to unspool in 2014 will be Steven Spielberg’s Robopocalypse, which the studio is producing along with Dreamworks and Disney.  It will debut worldwide on April 25th, 2014.  Robopocalypse is based on the bestselling science fiction novel by Daniel H. Wilson.

 

Fox also announced that it would be re-releasing Roland Emmerich’s 1996 blockbuster Independence Day in re-processed 3-D on July 3rd, 2013, though adding "depth" to the cardboard characters in this overripe exercise in mind-numbing silliness will take more than all the computing power of Silicon Valley put together.