That’s been my assumption too, and I personally put no stock in the Jackman rumors or anything like that’s. Just saying, if they were going to use the multiverse/time travel possibilities in Endgame to sidestep continuity concerns for any kind of winking, barely-canon, fan service cameo, it had better be the Defenders or the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Is it weird that I liked X3? And that I thought Apocalypse was pretty watchable, even if it was just that and no more? I think Fox has done a great job with these films. You’re always gonna have some misses. (Ant Man and the Wasp is objectively a terrible film. The first Thor film is risible, and the second isn’t much better. The second and third Iron Man films are not great. Avengers 2 is not great. etc.)
I want to subscribe to like, half of your newsletter.
You’re forgetting Origins: Wolverine (or perhaps that’s just the sane reaction to that ending), but otherwise I agree that the rest are at least watchable.
Personally, I feel the movies suffer from several issues:
- They don’t really care for the characters. A particular highlight in Infinity War, which contained really way too many characters for one move: was how every character still got their little, defining character moment (even if just a small one). That is not the case in most of the X-Men franchise films; so, so many of the characters are just in there to fill in the action sequences (or generally, fill in some screen-time while Jackman is not on-screen).
- They don’t really care about the coherence of the stories they tell. I’m not particularly prone to nitpick, but when I watched the franchise in sequence a couple of years back, it was just incredibly obvious how the characters will say things in one movie which completely contradict the events of the other movies (sometimes even in the same move) or how characters in multiple films just can’t be the same person despite clearly depicting the same mutant. Days of Future Past just made the problem worse. Logan is incidentally a good example of this, in that while good as a stand-alone, it just makes little sense in the context of the series. Which makes it hard to care - why should the viewer care, when the filmmakers clearly don’t.
I still don’t have much hope for this film. Dark Phoenix in the comics work because the events that happen there, happened to characters that the readers care about. As Wallapuctus mentioned above in one of the first posts, they haven’t earned the emotional investment with this Jean Grey to tell the story. It would be like jumping straight from the first 2 MCU films to Infinity War - there’s almost no way this is going to work.
It’s sad, because X-Men is easily a stronger franchise in theory than the MCU, but generally speaking it’s potential has been squandered. I’m also not particularly keen on seeing them folded into the MCU either - IMO, the X-Men stories are generally a poor fit with the rest of the Marvel universe (even in the comics). But we’ll see what happens with the franchise in Endgame.
Yes
gasp
Is that Ultron? Yeah that kind of sucked. It drives me batty that Wanda never even talks about her twin, you know the dead one.
This is a strange claim. I think that the X-men films are far more emotionally vested films than the MCU films. The MCU aims for funny, flashy spectacle. X-men aims for thematic resonance and character drama.
Do you have specific examples of this? I can’t think of anything. Maybe there are details that don’t match?
It’s tonally different (though not that tonally different), but I’m not sure how it doesn’t make sense.
Deadpool 2 and Logan are the best superhero films since Winter Soldier. Maybe the disconnect is that I don’t read superhero comics and thus don’t have the same connection to the stories that others do. (I mean, I’ve read a few of the more famous stories, but I generally read creator-owned comics with original stories.)
IMO, the X-Men movies are more emotionally grounded because the X-men stories are that way - and the movies that work, work because they hired some great actors in the key roles (e.g., the Xaviers, Magnetos, and of course Jackman). And those characters are fairly true to their origins. The rest - not so much.
Examples just off the top of my head: Mystique is pretty much an out and out villain in the comics; the new movies make her into a hero and leader of the X-Men. Cyclops in the comics is a tactical master-mind and Leader who can defeat all but the most powerful mutants 1-on-1 simply because he is smart enough to exploit their weaknesses and his own strengths - he’s basically the team’s Captain America but with actually useful powers of his own. He’s also the first X-Man, much like Cap is the first Avenger. None of that is evident in any of the film’s, where he essentially exists to mope over Jean and die. Iceman has always been the most immature X-Man in the comics. In the movies, he’s the most adult. Neither of the movie Angels have any connection with their comic counterpart other than the mutation. Colossus is just a non-entity (unless you consider Deadpool as party of continuity, which brings it’s own set of issues…). Though probably the most screwed-over character is Kitty Pryde, who has one of her signature comics book arcs - “Days of Future Past” - turned into yet another Wolverine movie.
That’s what I mean about them not caring about the characters, like at all. They exist to be slotted into whatever role suits the story they’re telling for that specific movie, and then to be discarded. The MCU doesn’t introduce superheroes unless they have something to do in the story. The X-Men universe is chock-full of pointless mutants. At heart, the early movies are basically star vehicles for Jackman. The latter try to diversify a bit, though in practice they’ve been pretty heavily dominated by Jenifer Lawrence (thus the complete change in the Mystique character to accomodate her star power).
As for the incoherence of the stories, the standout one’s that come to mind are Xavier’s disappearing/reappearing paralysis, same with pretty much anything related to Wolverine if you think about it, Beast’s surprise at the mutant cure in X3 (when the new movies show him essentially having developed one himself at a young age), the question of who built Cerebro (Magneto in X-Men, Beast in First Class), and of course Bolivar Trask (the imposing Bill Duke in X3… to be replaced by Peter Dinkage in Days of Future Past). Also, the age of most characters is just nonsene. E.g., Cyclops appears as a teenager in the Wolverine (set in 1970s), yet is a 20-30 year old in X-Men (set in the 2000s). Professor X doesn’t age noticeable from First Class (1962) to Apocalypse (1980s). Magneto is a teenager in 1943 which would make Fassbender’s Magneto >50 yrs old in Apocalypse.
Of course, the easy answer to that is just to say “Eh, who cares? They’re just movies”, which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, but it also makes it hard to become particularly invested in the movies as a series.
Logan is great as a stand-alone movie, btw, but it also postulates a future where all Mutants have been wiped out. Which kind of makes the events of Dark Phoenix pointless if you think about it, because no matter what happens in that film, they’re all dead by the time of Logan.
She has been. She’s also been a hero and I think even the leader of the X-Men. As has Magneto. I bet most of the other portrayals in these movies connect to some comic depiction at some point, because one thing mainstream superhero comics are basically not even trying to provide is consistent logical progressions of their characters or universes.
I still doubt they do. Disney is gonna reboot the franchise again most likely to bring it into the MCU which is itself getting reset after Endgame. Expect a totally new cast.
To be sure, I’ve not read everything X-Men (who has the stamina for that?), but I’ve read most of the major story arcs, and I’m pretty sure she’s never led the X-Men as herself. She’s also pretty consistent in always acting out of self-interest, except when she acts for family/lovers.
Magneto is different. He leads the X-Men because he’s BFFs with Xavier and picks up the mantle after his death. Mystique doesn’t - and the whole “Mystique as Xavier’s foster-sister” is completely out of left field (as is her relationship with Magneto - she doesn’t actually have a lot of interaction with the later in the comics at all).
In any case, when discussing Superheroes being “in character”, I assume we’re referring to their depiction in their major popular story arcs (at least that’s how I think of it). Superman has been depicted as out-and-out evil as well, but if that was the version being depicted in the DC movies, people would - rightly - be more than a little puzzled.
It’s a pity, because the main characters in the current cast (X, Magneto, Mystique, Beast) are pretty awesome. But mixing them into the MCU would be a terrible idea, so I’m pretty sure that’s not happening.
The new trailer:
Looks good to me!
So the obvious “real” bad guy is the white haired woman. Anyone have any idea who that is supposed to be? Should we recognize her?
Somewhere I think it was suggested she might be Cassandra Nova, whose Wikipedia page just makes my eyes roll all the way back into my head.
I thought she was Emma Frost honestly
She’s from Grant Morrison’s run on the X-Men, which is probably the single best self-contained chunk of that series, possibly ever. But Morrison does tend to get a bit loopy. I was astonished he was given creative control of Batman for multiple years.
His run on Batman was amazing, but I sure couldn’t explain why or outline the events that took place.
Lol the X-Men are being rounded up by the MCU
