James Franco has confirmed the rumours of his commitment to a movie based on the X-Men character Multiple Man.

The character has appeared on screen before, as a minor player in the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, in which he was portrayed by Eric Dane.

Franco’s version, though, appears to be a very different prospect. Taking cues from edgier properties such as Wolverine and Deadpool, the Academy Award nominee is planning a comic book movie aimed very much at an older crowd. He told The Hollywood Reporter:

“Our bottom line MO is, how can we push this into new ground? A little bit, but still make it entertaining? …what I love about what Simon Kinberg and Fox and the X-Men people have done with Deadpool and Logan — it took a while to get there, maybe 10 years — but they are going to go hard R.

“And we’re going to take this superhero thing and really just push it into a new genre. So we’re working with Simon Kinberg on an X-Men property.”

Multiple Man’s power, in the comic books, is to instantly create several duplicates of himself, sowing confusion among his enemies. Franco, currently in cinemas with The Disaster Artist, has some experience of playing aginst himself on screen – he recently played twins in David Simon’s porn-themed period drama The Deuce for HBO.