True story: when I wrote my X-MEN trilogy years ago, I was told I could use any six X-Men--but Wolverine had to be one of them.
Interesting. I wasn't told I had to use Wolverine in my X-Men novel. I used him because I found the character intriguing as he was portrayed in Claremont's comics and the '90s animated series (not necessarily in that order).
Wolverine became a Marvel mascot due to the ridiculous push they gave him to be in everything over the last 10 years.
No, it's the other way around. Wolverine has been a popular, standout character since the '80s. I believe he was the first X-Man to get a self-titled spinoff in the comics. Yes, it's true that the emphasis on the character has been greatly increased in the past decade due to his high profile in the movies, but his high profile in the movies was due to his already-high profile in the comics.
As for why Wolverine became such a dominant character in the movies, I think that's all due to Jackman. However revisionist I feel the take on "Wolverine as leading man" is, the fact is that Jackman makes a very effective leading man, audiences responded to that, and the filmmakers gave the audience what they wanted. You can never predict or control which actors will become the breakout stars of something. Gene Roddenberry had no idea that Spock would become hugely more popular than Kirk. Garry Marshall had no idea that Fonzie would overshadow the rest of the
Happy Days cast. And let's not even think about Urkel. Breakout characters can come from unexpected directions, and it's because of the appeal of the actors who play them, the unpredictable alchemy they bring to their roles. If Hugh Jackman had been cast as Cyclops, then Cyclops would've been the star of the trilogy and the one getting solo spinoffs.
I think your overstating the films' merits, but to each his own. I suppose it's true that the X-films did contribute to the current crop of superhero films by not being cheesy and being generally respectable overall, but I don't think that alone makes a film exceptional as a film. It just means that audiences had come to expect schlok like Batman and Robin from the genre.
I do find
X-Men to be a flawed film in a number of ways; it's improved by the restoration of most of the deleted scenes. But I think it's a good movie overall, one of the better entries in the genre. And while
X2 has its weaknesses (mainly, why the hell did Jean have to leave the Blackbird at the climax at all?), I think that overall it's one of the best of the Marvel superhero movies, surpassed only by the first two Spidey films.
If you take away what makes a film exceptional, then nothing exceptional remains, obviously. And I agree that much of Iron Man was fairly standard fare, but certain key elements rose above the formula.
But were they really
key elements? That's what I'm saying. It had exceptional style, but no exceptional substance. So while I had fun while I was watching it, I felt unsatisfied and empty almost immediately thereafter. That's not the mark of a genuinely great film, merely of an entertaining piece of fluff.
To a degree, I think Batman himself has always been a problem for Batman movies. It's apparently quite difficult to capture on film what makes the character so awesome in the comics, since I don't think even The Dark Knight succeeds in doing that until the final sequence. The weakest link in that whole movie is Bale as Batman, just as Keaton as Batman is often cited as a weakness of the Burton film. In both cases, it's the Joker and the overall canvas that stand out, despite the obvious chasm that separates the two films in so many important respects.
My problem with Burton's Batman isn't just Keaton, it's the whole conception of the character, particularly his casualness about blowing up the bad guys. Basically Burton and Sam Hamm went back to the earliest 1939 Batman stories and built on that in their own direction, ignoring all subsequent character development in the comics, such as Batman's reverence for life. And so it was practically a completely different character.
And the Joker was not in Burton's movie. The villain in that movie was Jack Nicholson in whiteface. Outside of
A Few Good Men, I've never seen Jack Nicholson play any character other than Jack Nicholson, and I've never understood the appeal of that.