bryan_singer_headshotYou ever wake up on a Saturday morning, crippled from drink with the sense memories of about seven too many Jack Daniels-based drinks lingering in the back of your throat (along with a flavor that you can’t identify, but strongly suspect is gonorrhea)? And then your phone rings, and it’s a friend of yours saying, “Um, buddy? What exactly is this thing you went me a cell phone picture of? It’s a little blurry, but I figure it’s either a couple of sand dunes in the Saraha Desert, or else you’d better start rehearsing the speech you’re gonna give to your neighbors when the judge orders you to… inform them.”

Of course you have; if you were an upstanding citizen, you’d be getting your comics information from a more reputable source (read: almost anywhere else). And that means you understand the innate and insidious nature of Twitter. Just four years ago, the worst thing you could do with your cell phone camera was baffle a single person. Now, you can baffle the whole world at once!

Which is a long way to go to say that X-Men: Days of Future Past director Bryan Singer has been Tweeting again.

Twenty four or so hours ago the news that Bryan Singer, the director of the first two X-Men movies that ushered in the modern age of generally excellent superhero movies made by A-List directors who give a shit about the characters as opposed to slumming and giving the thumbs-up to nipples and asscracks on the hero’s costume, had literally just signed to direct the fifth X-Men movie, Days of Future Past, would be the biggest geek movie news of the past six months. Particularly considering that the time travel nature of the story could allow Singer to liberally include cast members from later-set his X-Men movies, which appears to be a thing that is actually happening.

Yup, just yesterday morning, the word that Singer might be taking over from Matthew Vaughn, director of X-Men: First Class, while keeping Vaughn on as a producer (which, on one level, is good news, since Vaughn did a damn good job directing First Class, so I’m glad he’ll be involved… although the role of producer in movies and TV can vary widely from an active, hands-on role in development to, “Yeah, yeah; put my name wherever you want in the credits, so long as it’s on the right place on my check.”) would be the biggest news in genre film, particularly considering the change in directors so far hasn’t had an effect on the projected July 18, 2014 release date.