The X-Men Cinematic Universe (General Discussion)

There was no hammer in Infinity War.

 

Sorry. His ax had a similar power. in fact, it seems to have all the same powers except the worthiness clause.

 

So if they were going to go that route for a movie, would we probably end up with different actresses playing Jane and Thor then? I wonder if Natalie Portman would be willing to come back if she was the human half of Thor?

 

Or CGI.

 

Kind of like what the did with Chris Evans in the first Captain America?

 

I really hope Kevin Feige is planning to do an X-Men series for Disney+. You can still have them show up in the movies for crossovers, side stories and spin-offs and shit, but there are way too many beloved characters and storylines to do justice in even an expansive long-running film series ala Harry Potter (or Feige's similar way-more-than-just-a-trilogy plans with Spider-Man).

The template for Feige's X-Men shouldn't be Fox's X-Men or Disney's Avengers, but DisneyFox's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. We should have plenty of time to fully explore an ensemble cast through their romances and friendships. Quiet character-driven scenes and fun moments of the characters just goofing around and hanging out should be just as prevalent and integral as the fight scenes. The Dark Phoenix Saga should be the myth arc of the fourth season of a show that lasts seven seasons or longer.

By all means give the Deadpools, Wolverines, Kitty Prydes, Storms, New Mutants and X-Forces of the MCU their own spin-off movies, but for the love of Christ give both the core X-Men and Peter David's X-Factor Investigations their own TV series.

 

Or the Hulk.

 

What might have been-- Thor screenwriter Zach Stentz dishes out on the X-Men vs Fantastic Four "Civil War" movie that never was. Apparently, this project was shelved when First Class became a hit and the studio decided to take the franchise in another direction. The movie would have ended with a tease for a sequel based on "Secret Invasion".

 

Was the film series ultimately hurt by having way too loose an approach to continuity? Or (just) that too many films in a row seemed like they were each trying to be (The New) The Last Movie, one Finale after another? Are those factors pretty related or not?

 

They were hurt by making bad movies.

 

There weren't that many last movies. And one of them was Logan, which was 'the last Wolverine movie', not 'the last X-Men movie'.

 

I think Apocalypse, a movie I consider okay, was the big strikeout. After sidelining Magneto, whose ascent was teased in First Class' final scene, in favor of the DoFP crossover, and then ending that movie promising his ascent again, to then sideline him again in favor of some random blue baddie was a huge mistake. The third First Class movie should have been Xavier scrambling to put together a team to combat a rising Magneto. Instead, it half-assedly introduced a new team, but didn't ask us to really invest in them. So now we get a final movie built around a character the general public barely knows, and doesn't care about. Not a great plan...

 

I have to wonder if cutting the mall scene from Apocalypse was a mistake, even if it didn't move the Apocalypse plot forward, it might have at least given the new characters some more development.

 

Except it revealed that every single X-Men would die, and that as a concept the X-Men failed because their leader had magic bullshit powers that could randomly kill every X-Men because...reasons. I'd say killing off every X-Men character simultaneously while also eliminating mutants with magic food is pretty definitively an ending, which is why I never counted Logan as being in continuity because there is no way, if FOX had kept going, that they would have had all the X-Men die like they did in Logan, even if they kept making X-Men films for decades.

 

Somebody wasn't paying attention, because LOGAN explained exactly why Xavier ended up killing all of his students: he suffered brain trauma that created a fatal mental shockwave, which is a logical consequence of somebody as powerful of a telepath as Xavier suffering a brain issue.

 

Not really. We don't know exactly what happened. The news reports that the dead included 'some' of the X-men. Remember that Scott, Jean, and Storm would be about 60 by this point, and the Beast possibly 75+ so it isn't clear who those X-men might have been. In the Gifted, they confirm that the X-men at that time are 'missing'.

There have been several instances of the X-men being presumed dead but they could just as easily be off-world, or running covert missions from Australia. As Magneto says in the first movie, "Are you sure you saw what you thought you saw?"

 

They clearly had a plan for the first trilogy (Jean's transformation being triggered by Magneto's machine in X1) but then they dropped the ball by featuring dozens of characters from the comics in cameos and disintegrating them in X3. WTF? I'm not sure why they went with the notion of giving Jean a split personality before her power up. It was enough in the comics to explain that power corrupts. It corrupted Kelly's body, it could have corrupted Jean's mind and saved us some dialogue.

I think if they had held the course and planned for a second trilogy that actually built on the first one, we might have had a core team of X-men who we could have grown to love.

I've always said the second trilogy should have gone:

X4: Mutant Massacre: introduce the Marauders, wipe out the Morlocks, crucify Angel, paralyse Colossus, make Kitty stuck in her phased state and finish the movie with an epic Wolverine vs Sabertooth fight. The epilogue is Sinister being revealed to be a servant of Apocalypse.

X5: Fall of the Mutants: Angel recruited as Archangel ( and we actually care, since we know who he is from the previous movie). The wounded X-men are moved to Muir Island. New X-men are recruited to replace them (in the comics it was Psylocke, Dazzler, Havok, and Longshot but whatever). On Muir Island you'd have Banshee and Professor X mark 2 could be revealed. Epilogue after the Horsemen are defeated is Sinister revealing a pregnant but very much alive Jean Grey in a lab.

Wolverine 3: Story set on Muir Island dealing with treatment of the sick. Horror story featuring Proteus. Kitty grows close to Colossus.

X6: Days of Future Past. Pretty much the same but with Cable. You could even keep your options open and finish with...

X7: Age of Apocalypse. He succeeds is recasting reality. At the end of this movie reality resets but is it the same? Time to reboot the franchise...

 

It said seven. Is that everyone?

Fox made the movie. You're just in denial.

 

One doesn't have to dislike Logan's bleakness to view it as out of the main continuity: Logan says no new mutants have been born in 25 years, but there are children mutants in the happy DoFP future coda which takes place just a few yeas prior.

Nah, that would have been putting a band-aid on a case of leukemia.

 

I viewed it as a slight variation on the Onslaught story. Essex Corporation is run by Mister Sinister. There's a whole agenda there we're not seeing. It's not like him to squander good genetic material.

In my head canon, Banshee wasn't carved up for medical research following First Class. Those records were faked.