Between the original trilogy, the spin-off movies, and the First Class prequel, the X-Men franchise timeline has almost more flashbacks and sideways timelines than ABCs Lost series. The series has gone through four different directors before returning to Bryan Singer, who sat in the chair for the first X-Men movie. Now, Singer is back with a sequel to both his original series and Matthew Vaughn’s First Class – a kind of tie-in entry between two previously separate continuities that has never been attempted by a major comic-book franchise before.

Just yesterday in an online Q&A Singer spoke about a different tone for this new X-Men movie.

Though there is a great deal of humour, the overall tone is a bit darker than previous films, particularly because of the stakes. Potential extinction will do that to a mutant…

Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class, the official prequel in the movie franchise’s canon, was very much an optimistic origin story. While the stakes were pretty high, much of the plot revolved around the formation of Professor Xavier’s (James McAvoy) school of mutants. Bryan Singer’s Days of Future Past will have members of the older X-Men revisiting their younger selves through what appears to be some sort of (potentially interdimensional) time travel.

While we’ll have to wait until next year to see how dark the tone of the film gets, from the trailer (seen below) the stakes seem very high, and very personal.