The Big Picture

by Ben Fritz

  People have referred to Kinberg as a showrunner for the films he writes and produces, and the comparison is apt. In television, showrunners are combo writer-producers who serve as the chief creative authority over a series, writing key episodes during the season and overseeing the rest. They are the people with the overarching vision that connects each episode.

  Kinberg has written the last two X-Men movies, Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, and at the time we met, he was working on a third. He also wrote the 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four and served as producer of the hit X-Men spinoff Deadpool and upcoming ones, including X-Force and New Mutants. All are based on Marvel characters that Fox controls under a licensing deal signed several years before the comic book company went bankrupt and more than a decade before Marvel Studios started making its own movies.

  Though he works with a variety of filmmakers and Fox executives, Kinberg is the sole person to whom the studio entrusts near-total creative control and the one individual who takes credit for every success and gets the blame for every failure.

  “I have a profound, almost insane amount of freedom, where they trust me to make these movies until we fuck up consistently,” he says with both pride and a fear that’s particularly salient on this Tuesday, just two weeks after X-Men: Apocalypse opened to good but not great box office and a decidedly mixed reaction from critics and fans.

  The idea of a screenwriter as creative chief in the movies was unthinkable until very recently. Screenwriters were considered a dime a dozen, which is why big movies so often had four or six or more of them working on a script until it satisfied the lead actors, the studio, and the director, the ones who were really in charge.

  On the first two X-Men movies, there was no question that the director, Bryan Singer, was the creative visionary. He helmed the 2000 original and its 2003 sequel and was set to do 2006’s number three until he left Fox to direct Superman Returns for Warner Bros., which caused a squabble between the two studios. Directors led most key studio franchises in the first decade of the 2000s. Paramount’s Transformers franchise belonged to Michael Bay, and Warner Bros.’ Dark Knight trilogy was under the purview of Chris Nolan.

  The success of Marvel Studios changed that, as it did so many things in Hollywood. When it proved that fans would turn out for, and even preferred, multiple related superhero movies appearing in the same year, the idea of putting a director in charge went out the window, because each film required a director’s near-total attention for two years.

  Simon Kinberg was suited for the world of screenwriter-as-franchise-master because he had long approached his profession with a mind equally attuned to the industry’s commercial needs and his own creative desires. The son of a writer-producer who met his wife, an assistant director, while working in England, Kinberg was born in London but spent most of his childhood in Los Angeles, where his father worked largely in TV miniseries before becoming a film professor.

  Kinberg grew up in Hollywood but was largely repulsed by it. His father had been only moderately successful and had “complicated feelings” about his profession. Many of Kinberg’s friends at the private school he attended in the 1980s were the children of film-industry professionals who were snorting drugs and getting divorced and generally doing whatever was necessary to turn their kids into the future protagonists of a Bret Easton Ellis book.

  He learned to love movies nonetheless, both by watching classic black-and-white films from his father’s youth on their Betamax deck and going to the local theater for personal favorites like Beverly Hills Cop, The Terminator, and The Empire Strikes Back, which he saw more than twenty times.

  But Kinberg figured he would be a “real” writer. He wrote short stories while studying English at Brown and, afterward, during off-hours from his menial job in New York in the mid-1990s. He wasn’t successful at getting anything published, though, and when friends suggested that his stories, which were driven more by plot than character or point of view, read like screenplays, he decided to see whether the comparison was valid. Despite the milieu of his youth, Kinberg had never read a screenplay.

  At the dawn of the Internet, it was almost impossible to find screenplays online, so Kinberg spent hours reading them in an archive at Lincoln Center, which was close to his apartment. He was intrigued by the scripts and felt he had an intuitive understanding of how they worked, as he used a notepad and pencil to reverse-engineer the structure of each one he read. This, he figured, might be a better path for his career than short stories, not because he felt the need to express himself on the big screen rather than the printed page, but because it was easier for him.

  And so Kinberg enrolled at Columbia Film School and quickly found he was right. By his second year, an original script of his about grave robbers in nineteenth-century New York caught the attention of producers teaching a class, and they helped him submit it to professionals in L.A., landing him an agent, a manager, and relationships with young executives, which helped kick-start his career.

  That script was never made, but his meetings led to a connection that led to his first paid job, writing a horror movie for Warner Bros. By the end of his second year, Kinberg had a career as a writer-for-hire in Los Angeles and started missing classes at Columbia.

  To finish his degree, he decided to write a thesis script that might also sell in Hollywood. Mr. and Mrs. Smith was inspired by a girlfriend who told Kinberg that he was a great partner when there was conflict and tension in the relationship, but a bad one when things were calm. Upon reflection, Kinberg saw that the critique was accurate. It also inspired a big movie idea, about an unhappy pair of married spies whose love is rekindled when they are hired to kill each other. “Almost everything I’ve written from scratch has some really personal, emotional component to it,” Kinberg reflected in his office years later. “It just manifests itself as superheroes and spies.”

  Kinberg tried pitching Mr. and Mrs. Smith to every studio in town twice, once on his own and once with the help of the producer Akiva Goldsman, who liked the idea. When nobody bought it, he decided to simply write the script, finish his Columbia degree, and see if anyone would buy the final product.

  He eventually found a small company that was interested and got his big break when it signed Nicole Kidman, then one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood, to star. That started a seven-year process during which Brad Pitt signed on, Kidman dropped out, Angelina Jolie replaced her, and an epically long production and series of reshoots became a paparazzi sensation, once word leaked out that the stars had become a romantic couple.

  Kinberg got to spend more time on set than most first-time screenwriters could dream of because the producer, Goldsman, was also a writer and protected him. And because the director, Doug Liman, liked to experiment with different versions of a scene and didn’t always get along with his stars, Kinberg learned how to interface with high-maintenance filmmakers and actors as he performed endless rewrites on set.

  Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a huge hit when it was released in the summer of 2005 and accelerated an already healthy career for its screenwriter.

  Over the next few years, Kinberg did uncredited rewrites, often at the last minute and on set, for movies including the action sequel Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, the comedies Night at the Museum 2 and Date Night, the Tom Cruise–Cameron Diaz flop Knight and Day, and Fox’s first Fantastic Four, which did decently at the box office but earned little love from comic book readers. Now working regularly at Fox and also friendly with Avi Arad and Kevin Feige at Marvel, who produced the X-Men movies, Kinberg was hired to co-write the third film in the series: X-Men: The Last Stand. The experience was “complicated” for him, since he got to adapt the story Dark Phoenix, beloved of comic book readers—but despite its box-office success, fans scorned the resulting movie.

  Perhaps most notable, Kinberg was on set in Vancouver for most of the shoot of The Last Stand, working directly with Ratner and the stars Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, and Patrick Stewart. When he served a simil
ar role on his next film, Jumper, also directed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith‘s Liman, Kinberg requested and received a producer credit for his work. He also signed a multi-year producing deal with Fox. He wanted to make on-set work with talent a core part of his career and not something he did as an adjunct.

  “I learned on Jumper I can do both of these things and they are fulfilling to me in different ways,” he reflected. “Producing is less lonely than writing and I enjoy being with people solving tangible problems. Perhaps not as much as living in my imagination, but I enjoy it.”

  Under that deal, he was asked to help the studio reboot the X-Men franchise in 2011, since The Last Stand and a 2009 spinoff focused on Jackman’s Wolverine character had disappointed fans and Marvel Studios had by now set a new standard for superhero universes.

  Together with Singer, who also produced, and the director, Matthew Vaughn, Kinberg helped shape X-Men: First Class, which featured a new origin story with a young cast. It didn’t do as well at the box office, perhaps because the franchise had lost momentum in the public compared to The Avengers, but it was well received by fans and critics and gave Fox confidence to make more superhero movies more frequently.

  Kinberg was charged with making it happen. The studio needed an architect for its superhero universe, and he was the most obvious candidate. So he wrote and produced X-Men: Days of Future Past, spending every day on set with Singer, who returned to direct, and becoming as close as anyone behind the camera to the cast, all of whom he knew from The Last Stand and First Class.

  Days of Future Past was shot in Montreal in 2013, a difficult year for Kinberg, as his marriage was falling apart. He considered himself “a very optimistic person, especially for a Jewish writer,” but splitting with his wife of fourteen years was a painful experience, and he felt hopeless. Stuck rewriting the script at the same time, Kinberg turned it into a therapeutic process, injecting the comic book story he was adapting with a subplot in which James McAvoy’s Professor X has lost hope and has to be convinced that he and his team can still make a difference.

  Kinberg rewrote a key scene between McAvoy and Stewart, who play the character Professor X at different ages and briefly meet, thanks to time travel. Kinberg worked on the scene while at the airport on his way back to Montreal, after telling his two young sons about the divorce.

  “It’s not their pain you’re afraid of, it’s yours,” Stewart’s character says to McAvoy’s character in that scene. “And as frightening as it can be, their pain will make you stronger if you allow yourself to feel it, embrace it. It will make you more powerful than you ever imagined. It’s the greatest gift we have: to bear pain without breaking. And it’s born from the most human power: Hope. Please, Charles, we need you to hope again.”

  Days of Future Past achieved in 2014 what the franchise hadn’t enjoyed since X2 in 2003: a blockbuster hit at the box office, at nearly $750 million, that also thrilled fans. The franchise was back on track, and the studio now wanted Kinberg to help it pump out multiple superhero films every year. There were now so many that he couldn’t write or be on set for them all, though he would remain as the creative overseer.

  He wrote and produced 2015’s Fantastic Four, a reboot that proved to be a debacle both creatively and at the box office. Reshoots attempting to salvage the film only made it worse, particularly when the costar, Kate Mara, wore a wig that didn’t remotely resemble her hair on the original shoot.

  The studio blamed the director Josh Trank’s erratic behavior on set. But Kinberg, speaking a year later, said that as the studio’s superhero showrunner, he bore some responsibility. He was particularly remorseful that he made the movie about how powers are a psychological burden, almost like a disease. Fantastic Four, he concluded, should have been more playful, with a pop science-fiction feel. “You can blame execution when you miss by a little bit,” he said of Fantastic Four, which grossed only $168 million. “But when you miss by a mile, you have to look at what’s broken in the DNA.”

  Things turned out much better for the X-Men in 2016, though not in the way anyone expected. Apocalypse, the sequel to Days of Future Past, featuring the core superhero team, did well but not great. The low-budget spinoff Deadpool, however, was massive, grossing $768 million on a budget of just $58 million. It later became the first superhero flick nominated for a Golden Globe for best picture.

  The idea for an R-rated spinoff, featuring a loud-mouthed antihero who mocks other X-Men, had been in the works for a decade. Kinberg’s biggest contribution came in supporting its greenlight, helping with reshoots that enhanced the movie’s romantic relationship, and turning a series of unconnected scenes into an action montage. Nonetheless, its success was a boon to Kinberg’s superhero cinematic universe. By late 2016, Ryan Reynolds’s character, Deadpool, was a key part of the writer-producer’s burgeoning plans for the X-Men movies, which Kinberg hoped would soon reach a cadence of two or three films per year, matching Marvel Studios.

  Speaking from his home in the Hollywood Hills, where he was writing the first draft of 2018’s X-Men movie, which would retell and perhaps redeem the Dark Phoenix story line from 2006’s The Last Stand, Kinberg said he was preparing for an even bigger step. He planned to direct the film. It was a big step for a writer, but perhaps also a natural one, since no one knew the X-Men franchise, characters, or cast better.

  Many screenwriters have a “one for them, one for me” philosophy, in which they balance assignments to write sequels or comic book adaptations with their own new creations. Kinberg hasn’t written an original screenplay since Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He briefly considered doing so in early 2016, when a flu knocked him out for nearly a month and he lost fifteen pounds from an already thin frame. “Maybe I need to take a break,” he said to himself, “and write something from scratch.”

  So Kinberg sat down over a weekend and started brainstorming ideas. The latest issues on his mind had to do with love and loss, pain, jealousy, and anger. He started thinking about how to work them into a movie and soon he saw it: they would be the themes of 2018’s X-Men sequel, now called simply Dark Phoenix.

  “The truth is that I find myself in these movies, I’m not writing them on an assembly line,” he said. “My brain is always living in these stories, even when I think I may die from the flu.”

  The Writers’ Room

  As movies were increasingly being managed like corporate brands and run like television shows, it was perhaps inevitable that those two forces would meld.

  That’s exactly what Simon Kinberg’s former mentor, the writer-producer Akiva Goldsman, has been doing in a new phase of his career.

  On a soundstage on the Paramount Pictures lot where the TV show Glee used to be shot, the bald, glasses-wearing Goldsman, who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, gathered a group of ten eclectic screenwriters in 2016 to imagine a new cinematic universe that could spawn a never-ending series of movies.

  The room was filled with whiteboards, TV screens, and toys that would look familiar to anyone who watched TV in the 1980s, with names like G.I. Joe, M.A.S.K., and the Micronauts. The writers sitting at a square table were brought there not just by Paramount, but by its corporate partner, the company that made those toys, Hasbro.

  Goldsman and his writers, a group that included the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon and the Guardians of the Galaxy writer Nicole Perlman, were charged with creating the framework for a “Hasbro cinematic universe,” one that could weave together a new lineup of movies that might also sell a few million new toys.

  The task, as Goldsman described it, was “universe building,” and that term is essential to understanding moviemaking in Hollywood today. On the biggest and most important films, it’s no longer just about the writer who comes up with the story and the director who translates it visually. Today, the design of the overarching fiction, the cinematic universe in which all of the films will take place, is the beating heart of the creative process.

  And behind most cinematic universes, of cours
e, is a brand—most frequently one that can sell a lot of consumer products. Just as the Marvel cinematic universe was created to sell more toys, Hasbro partnered with Paramount on its planned series of movies for the same purpose. It’s exactly the same reason why there were cheesy after-school cartoons in the 1980s featuring the same characters. But like nearly everything unsavory about TV from the past, that strategy is now migrating to the big screen.

  It thus made perfect sense to also borrow the key creative process of television production: the writers’ room. In TV, a team of writers brainstorms overall story arcs for a season and then works together to outline the key plot points of each episode. Only then do individual writers go off to script an episode.

  Hasbro, with its plan to make a series of films that would overlap and fit together in a larger story line, wanted a team of writers to do the exact same thing for them. “Movies and TV have inverted in their most essential values . . . including that which was most endemic to television: the ongoing stories and character arcs which are best addressed by the writers’ room,” Goldsman explained.

  Goldsman’s bosses were equally enthusiastic about the writers’ room, though for a very different reason. “It allows us to activate our brand more effectively and do much more long lead planning when you’ve got writers coming up with multiple ideas for movies all at once,” Stephen Davis, Hasbro’s chief content officer, said. Translation: When you know there’s a M.A.S.K. movie coming out in 2020, you can more easily convince Toys “R” Us to put a lot more M.A.S.K. toys on its shelves that year.

  It’s the most cynical reason possible to make a movie. Which is why Goldsman, if he didn’t want his films to feel like tools to help with merchandise planning for toys, needed to go to great lengths to make his writers’ room as joyous a place as possible. The Hasbro writers’ room was actually Goldsman’s second such effort. In 2015, he led a writers’ room for the Transformers movies on the Paramount lot, planning out a series of interconnected films that took the robot franchise from an every-two-or-three-years event to an annual occurrence starting in 2017.