Did he jump or was he pushed? Gay director Bryan Singer was, until recently, lined up to direct the X-Men prequel, following on from his megaphone duties on the first two X-Men movies. However, Brit helmer Matthew Vaughn is now in the chair while Singer stays on as a producer.

I guess we’ll never know the politics behind this decision, but it’s fair to say that Bryan Singer, after the relative failure of Superman Returns and Valkyrie, is no longer the hot property he once was – you just have to check out his future projects on IMDB for proof of that: a Battlestar Galactica rehash and the ignominy of directing a sequel to dodgy X-Men spin-off, Wolverine.

With Matthew Vaugn and his regular writing partner Jane Goldman in charge can we expect a light dusting of homophobic jokes over X-Men: First Class? They’re using an original story by Singer as the basis for the film, but Goldman has a hand in the screenplay and this is the woman who created the fey, cross-dressing pirate played by Robert De Niro in Stardust and also revived the antique gay slur ‘whoopsie’ in the script.

Worse was to come in Kick-Ass with the running joke that the teenage superhero-wannabe was perceived to be gay because he got beaten up by two thugs (a hetero would have been able to defend himself, you see). Kick-Ass then runs with the ‘gay’ tag in order to get close to the girl. How enlightened.

So, can we look forward to some oh-so-amusing misunderstandings about the nature of Professor Xavier’s and Magneto’s relationship in the new X-Men movie? Maybe reintroduce the term ‘pansy’? Whatever the outcome, the film is at least shaping up to have the best looking cast of the year, with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Nicholas Hoult attached.