Exclusive: Watch 'X-Men' Writer Simon Kinberg Answer Questions About 'Days of Future Past' and the Coming 'Apocalypse'

If you were one of the millions who caught this summer’s time-hopping, mind-fogging X-Men: Days of Future Past, you probably left the theater as confused as you were enthralled: With so many of the franchise’s biggest characters hopping through different timelines and iterations, it was hard to know exactly where things stood in the mutant universe, and what to X-pect from future films.

Luckily, Days of Future Past screenwriter co-writer Simon Kinberg is here to help. In this the exclusive clip above, he answers Yahoo Movies readers’ questions about where the series has gone and where it’s going.

Halle Berry as Storm.

Among the revelations: The forthcoming X-Men: Apocalypse — due out in 2016 — will focus largely on the generation of X-Men introduced in 2011's X-Men: First Class, including Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Magneto (Michael Fassbender), and Charles Xavier (James McAvoy). That means later-day characters like Kitty Pryde (played by Ellen Page) are out of the picture, at least for now. "In Apocalypse, it will really to be the continuation of the 'past' of Days of Future Past," Kinberg says.

Also likely not to be back in the franchise for a while: First-wave characters like Storm, who was played by Halle Berry in 2000's X-Men, but who's yet to appear in the "past" timeline. Because Apocalypse takes place twenty years before the first X-Men film, if a character such as Storm — or, for that matter, James Mardsen's Cyclops or Famke Jannsen's Jean Grey — were to appear in the next film, they'd likely have to be replaced by younger actors.

Members of the original X-Men cast.

"It'd be very hard to do, because Halle, Famke, and Jimmy and others have done such wonderful jobs of bringing those characters to life," says Kinberg. "But I also would have said before First Class that there would be no actors who can stand alongside Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart."

There's plenty more X-Men info where that came from, including Kinberg's explanation of why Rogue (Anna Paquin) had such a small role in the most recent film, and an official chronology of all 7 X-Men films. Watch the video above, and look out for X-Men: Days of Future Past when it’s released on home video on Oct. 14.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with new information since it was originally posted