Simon Kinberg, the X-Men Fixer Now Holding the Pen on Star Wars

Simon Kinberg

Photo: thedemonhog / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 2, 1973 Hammersmith, London, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Screenwriter, producer and director
Known for	Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Simon Kinberg has spent most of his working life in the chair just behind the director’s. He rebuilt the stories that stalled and kept the X-Men films running for Fox while Bryan Singer, Matthew Vaughn and James Mangold got the posters. The single time he took the front seat on his own franchise, with Dark Phoenix, the film collapsed, and he said so in three words: “that’s on me.” Lucasfilm has now given that same writer the job of inventing what Star Wars looks like after the Skywalkers. The question his career is asking is whether the fixer can also be the architect.

The habits behind that question were formed early, and on two continents. Kinberg was born in Hammersmith, in west London, and moved to Los Angeles as a small boy. His father, Jud Kinberg, was a New York-born writer and producer, so the industry was dinner-table talk rather than a distant glamour. He went to Brentwood School, then to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and finally to Columbia University’s film programme.

Columbia, where he finished his MFA in 2003, is where the first trick of his career happened. His thesis script was a comedy about a bored married couple who turn out to be rival assassins. It became Mr. & Mrs. Smith, directed by Doug Liman with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, released in 2005 and a worldwide hit. Kinberg even turns up on screen, briefly, as a banker. Almost twenty years later the same idea returned as a Prime Video series with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, still crediting him for the characters.

Studios noticed how quickly he could make a story work. He co-wrote X-Men: The Last Stand with Zak Penn in 2006 and joined the writing team of Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes in 2009. By then he had his own company, Genre Films, which signed a first-look deal with Fox in 2010 and turned him into something rarer than a screenwriter: the person a studio calls when a franchise is in trouble.

The X-Men became his long apprenticeship. He produced X-Men: First Class, then wrote and produced X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014, a time-travel story that quietly erased the timeline of the film he had co-written eight years earlier. Under his watch Fox also made Deadpool, the R-rated gamble that changed what superhero comedy could earn, and Logan, Mangold’s elegy for Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine. Kinberg produced both. Few people in Hollywood have had a hand in that many corners of a single mythology.

Outside the mutants he moved with the same ease. He produced Ridley Scott‘s The Martian, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and Kenneth Branagh‘s run of Agatha Christie films. He was also already inside the Star Wars machine: Kathleen Kennedy brought him in alongside Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt to map the sequel trilogy, and with Dave Filoni and Carrie Beck he created the animated series Star Wars Rebels, which ran for four seasons on Disney XD.

Then came the test. Dark Phoenix, his debut as director in 2019, returned to the same comic-book saga he had already adapted in X-Men: The Last Stand, as if he wanted to get it right the second time. The production went through reshoots of the third act and several release-date changes, and the film opened to poor reviews and some of the weakest box office in the series. Kinberg did not hide behind the studio. He told KCRW’s The Business that as writer-director, the failure belonged to him. His second feature, the spy thriller The 355, with Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz and Lupita Nyong‘o, landed in 2022 with little more impact.

That is the uncomfortable part of the record. Kinberg’s great talent has been fixing structures that other people direct, and both films where he held every lever struggled. Fans who still blame him for X-Men: The Last Stand read the Star Wars news through exactly that lens, and it is a fair question rather than an insult.

Television gave him a second route. After Genre Films left Fox in 2019, at the end of a two-decade relationship, he developed the revival of The Twilight Zone with Jordan Peele and directed one of its episodes. With David Weil he created Invasion for Apple TV+, an alien-arrival drama told from the ground up, whose third season ran from August to October 2025. With his producing partner Audrey Chon he now works under a first-look deal at Apple, which carried the Colin Farrell detective series Sugar and, from May 2026, the Tatiana Maslany thriller Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.

The cinema work has not stopped. Kinberg produced Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, with Glen Powell, released in November 2025. He also wrote Here Comes the Flood, the heist script Netflix bought from him in 2020, now directed by Fernando Meirelles with Denzel Washington and Robert Pattinson; Netflix has moved it to 2027.

Away from sets he keeps a low profile. Born on 2 August 1973, he was married to Mali Heled from 2001 until their divorce in 2017 and has two sons from that marriage. His partner is the writer Cleo Wade, with whom he has two daughters.

Everything now points at a galaxy far, far away. Lucasfilm announced in November 2024 that Kinberg would write and produce a new trilogy. Kennedy, before stepping down as Lucasfilm president in January 2026, described a treatment of about seventy pages and called it a new saga. On 26 September 2026, Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter reported that Jon Watts, director of the Tom Holland Spider-Man films and co-creator of Skeleton Crew, would direct the first instalment. Lucasfilm, now run by Filoni and Lynwen Brennan, has not confirmed the deal, Disney has not formally greenlit the films, and no title or date exists. The man who once co-created Star Wars Rebels with Filoni is writing for him now. For the first time in his career, Kinberg is not repairing someone else’s mythology. He is writing the foundation of one.

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