X-Men: Apocalypse type Movie genre Adventure

It’s a brave new world for the X-Men. Days of Future Past effectively reset the timeline, and now one of the most powerful villains from the comics is coming for the sequel. Fox released a video of writer-producer Simon Kinberg answering fan-submitted questions about X-Men: Apocalypse, and he teased, “I think in some ways it’s the biggest X-Men film we’ve ever done.”

Oscar Isaac portrays the title villain, an ancient mutant who awakens in the present to enforce his will on the world. “We’ve never done one of these movies where the whole world — there’s like an extinction-level threat to the world,” Kinberg said. “The whole world’s at stake.”

So what is Apocalypse’s master plan besides the devastation glimpsed in the trailer? While Kinberg kept specifics under wraps, he said, “He’s more interested in the sort of survival of the fittest. The strongest, no matter what they may be, surviving and making essentially a better world.”

In another sense, X-Men: Apocalypse is one of the franchise’s biggest endeavors in that it follows a major shift. “We did something kind of radical and crazy in Days of Future Past where we created a new timeline,” Kinberg explained. “We sort of broke the established timeline of the movies that had been X1, 2, 3 forward, and we created a new sort of history for the X-Men.”

X-Men: The Last Stand, which loosely adapted The Dark Phoenix Saga from the comics, featured the deaths of Jean Grey and Cyclops, while many more were killed in the beginning of Days of Future Past. In the end, this was all righted.

Kinberg continued, “Now that we’ve created that history, we take that to be canon. We take it to be law, and so it’s really important that we continue to tell those stories…knowing that really the only destination, ultimately, is the little glimpse into the Xavier mansion at the end of Days of Future Past in the future part.”

X-Men: Apocalypse will debut in theaters on May 27. Watch Kinberg’s full Q&A in the video above.