Bryan Singer tweets 'X-Men: Apocalypse' to follow 'X-Men: Days Of Future Past' in 2016

Bryan Singer, who helmed the first two X-Men movies returns to the franchise to direct X-Men: Days Of Future Past. The dying film series was revived by Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class in 2011 and the ambitious critically acclaimed story-line behind X-Men: Days of Future Past hopes to keep the flame alive.

Most studios wait to see how well a film does at the box-office to announce a sequel, however, Bryan Singer may have jumped the gun. 

On December 6, he tweeted this.

#Xmen #Apocalypse 2016!

— Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) December 5, 2013

20th Century Fox later confirmed the tweet announcing that X-Men: Apocalypse is set to release in May 2016.

Now, most X-Men fans will come to the conclusion that the next movie in the franchise, dubbed X-Men: Apocalypse, will centre around or at least feature in no small part, one of the oldest mutants in existence - Apocalypse.

Now to those familiar with the comics, Apocalypse (En Sabah Nur) is one of the Marvel Universe's most powerful villains often coming to blows with the X-Men since his introduction in X-Factor #05.

There are two ways the X-Men cinematic universe can introduce the character.

One, he becomes the main antagonist in the film; which would mean the X-Men will have their hands full. Apart from his near immorality, superhuman strength, teleportation, technopathy and other assortment of powers, he is also a master strategist and has a genius level intellect that possibly rivals Bruce Banner and Reed Richard.

The second possibility is the incorporation of the Age Of Apocalypse story-line which involves, yep you guessed it, Time Travel. Now this would be a little more difficult (not to mention confusing) to pull off, seeing as how Days of Future Past has quite a bit of time travelling in it.

The comic story-line Age of Apocalypse was extremely well received by critics and fans alike and features major changes in an alternate timeline. The plot of the story revolves around Legion, the son of Charles Xavier travelling back to the time when Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr (Magneto) were still friends with the intention of killing him. However Xavier dies, sacrificing himself to save Magneto and the timeline gets disrupted. It is at this moment that Apocalypse decides to strike and take control of the world. Many of the X-Men's paths change due to this alteration in the timeline, including Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Gambit, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Collosus, Iceman and Magneto himself.

How Singer will incorporate this new movie with the already existing films is yet to be seen, especially since a sequel to The Wolverine has already been announced. But fans of the movies can take solace in the fact that at least one more X-Men movie is on the way.