Spoilers Suicide Squad - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Needed a 20 minute origin backstory explaining how he became a brony.
Suicide Squad has passed MOS domestically. If you exclude China's contributions to GOTG, SS has surpassed that film internationally. The last market SS has to open in is Japan on September 10th. Projections are for $10-15 million total from that country. Those foreign markets, man. In other news STBeyond netted a cool $30 million from China so far. Hopefully it picks up more.
Looking at the numbers the DC and Marvel films stack up, I can't help but feel bad for Fox's X-Men. Before Apocalypse, what were they doing wrong?
Looking at the numbers the DC and Marvel films stack up, I can't help but feel bad for Fox's X-Men. Before Apocalypse, what were they doing wrong?
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I've been debating this with a few friends recently. We think the X-Men movies have just turned out a bit bland. They need to push the boundaries more. The mutants seen in them have been dumbed down versions of their comic book counterparts. They need more power, more magic, more aliens. And the main character needs to be Cyclops, not Mystique.
The X-Men movies are still stuck in the FOX rut. They are still fun, but they could be so much more. They really should clean house after Wolverine 3 and start over. All New Uncanny X-Men. No more spin-offs/sequels/prequels to the same damn material over and over. And stop just mixing and matching character names with other powers and personalities. If you choose a character, use the character. Stop treating them the way Michael Bay treats the Autobots and Decepticons.
@bold
Hopefully JLaw follows through with her proclamation to leave the franchise. She was so checked out in Apocalypse, they might as well have excluded her all together.
I intend to rewatch all the X-Men films when Apocalypse hits home video, but even watching Apocalypse, I got the feeling that the movie was just repeating what the previous films did. I mean, with Fassbender Magento, what is his arc? Every film he does something bad/over the line and is allowed to fly off at the end, rather than face consequences. It's like they're hurting for ideas of what to do with the X-Men, when the X-Men is an IP that has catalogs of material to pull from.
F*cking right? Singer has been really bad about this since his first two X films. Poor Jubilee. She's been in 3 X-Men films under Singer, and he's yet to do ANYTHING constructive with her. Cyclops and Havok have both gotten the shaft from Singer as well. Bring back Matthew Vaughn, bring in J.J Abrams, hell, let Joss Whedon direct an X-Men picture. He does ensemble casts and action better than Singer does.
Joss Whedon doing an X-Men movie (for which I think he's way better suited than the Avengers) would be...
But only if he gets to ignore everything Fox has done so far and can start from scratch.
ASTONISHING X-MEN!!!
I missed the intro card. I didn't need any kind of big backstory for it or anything, I was just wondering if there was more to it.
I really enjoyed the previous two entries. Apocolyose failed for me because
1.) He should have been SO much more menacing
2.) Hated what they did to Magneto. After the events of the last two films he should already be psychologically where McKellans character was in his attitude towards humans. Same goes for Mystique. These are bad guys. Stop trying to make them good guys.
3.) Enough with Wolverine. Im tired of him popping up all the time. Focus on the many other interesting characters that are in the Xmen universe.
I was thinking exactly this. Wheadon already has an outstanding arc he could translate to a movie.
There are a couple unfortunate issues that have plagued the entire series:
1. The focus is way too narrow for a team series. The first three movies followed the same formula: an overarching story that boils down to Xavier vs Magneto featuring Wolverine, plus basically other 1 co-star (First Rogue, then Nighcrawler, then Beast) and a villain. Everyone else was a glorified cameo. The second trilogy basically just replaced Wolverine with Mystique (first co-starring with Havok, then Beast and Wolverine - a little shake-up there - then Jean Grey).
2. They constantly run away from the comic book style even when it would actually make sense. Apocalypse took place in the 80s, yet they're wearing hard shell black combat suits that look like something from Halo. This may have helped them way back in the beginning when comic book movies were a novelty, but now they're running away from the most popular genre in Hollywood.
3. They annoy the fans by throwing out one wasted cameo after another, repeatedly killing off popular characters without even giving them anything worthwhile to do, and making massive personality and ability changes for no logical reason whatsoever. Yet at the same time, they try to 'please' the fans by including all these different mutants who don't even need to be there and basically just feel like pointless characters that no one cares about (and more casual viewers might even find it annoying trying to understand why all these random characters are here).
4. They're too obsessed with being serious, even at the expense of being authentic or logical. Not saying they should joke around like the Avengers, but several of the characters they have used are supposed to have a real sense of humor that should've come through more. And at the very least, the 'we're the serious, adult superhero franchise' argument begins to ring hollow when people are constantly let off the hook for the consequences of their actions (seriously, how many times are you just going to release Magneto back into the world?).
5. The action, while solid and entertaining, never feels unique and doesn't make much use of the awesome capabilities the characters have (the future scenes in DoFP are a refreshing exception to this, but unfortunately Apocalypse once again dropped the ball). They also rarely ever feel like an actual team. Most of the big action scenes in the franchise are one on one or two or three on one. Six movies into the franchise (of one of the most popular superhero teams in history) and there have been basically two fight sequences that actually hinged on teamwork instead of just pairing people off.
None of those things necessarily will sink a movie. Days of Future Past and X-Men United were resounding successes despite them, and First Class wasn't bad overall either. But they've all started to wear increasingly thin over time, and Apocalypse was probably the absolute worst example of almost every single one of those issues to date (excepting Wolverin Origins, which should never be spoken of at all), so the backlash is even bigger. Plus it gets extra demerits for the most powerful enemy on the X-Men roster not even getting one good fight scene, and the fact that really none of the recurring characters actually even had a good part in this movie, leaving the entire thing to be carried by the new cast - who were actually quite good (they gave me hope for the next movie), but not good enough to make up for everything else.
Presentation and internal logic are more than just fan complaints. Many of the complaints listed have a direct impact on character, story, suspense and catharsis.