X-Men Bracket Game: Final Round - Lebeau's Le Blog

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/06/17/x-men-bracket-game-final-round/

Dark Phoenix has officially bombed at the box office. The final installment in the increasingly complicated X-Men film series. Or at least the main series. There are offshoots. As movie franchises go, X-Men is one of the most messy. That’s appropriate given the impenetrable continuity that has built up around Marvel’s mutant superheroes in comic books. For this bracket game, I have picked thirty-two X-Men from the huge cast of characters. We’ll spend the next several weeks letting readers pick their favorite.

When X-Men: Last Stand was released in 2006, Fox expected it to be the final movie in the mutant trilogy. But that didn’t mean they wanted out of the X-Men business. Their plan was to continue the series with solo spin-off movies.

The first and most obvious candidate for the solo treatment was Wolverine. Hugh Jackman had broken out as the star of the series and Wolverine was easily the most popular character in the movies. So you can imagine the panic that must have set in at Fox when X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a box office disappointment!

If Wolverine couldn’t carry a movie, what chance did Storm or Magneto have? They needed a back-up plan for their back-up plan. The answer was obvious. Reboot. Reboots were all the rage in the aughts following the success of Batman Begins, Casino Royale and Star Trek among others. It had been more than a decade since the first X-Men movie. A reboot seemed sensible.

X-Men: First Class introduced a new cast of mostly familiar mutants. James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence were the stand-outs. While First Class didn’t set the box office on fire (it grossed even less than Wolverine) it did provide a solid foundation to continue the series.

This is where things get weird. First Class was set in the 1960’s. Some of the characters’ ages didn’t line up very well with the depiction of the same characters in the 2000 X-Men. That’s not a problem for a reboot, but Hugh Jackman had a cameo in the movie implying that all the X-films were set in the same continuity.

Fox doubled down on Jackman by continuing to make solo Wolverine movies side-by-side with the rebooted team movies. The Wolverine was an improvement over X-Men: Origins, but it became the lowest-grossing X-Men movie prior to Dark Phoenix.

The following year, Days of Future Past combine both casts with Wolverine smack dab in the middle of the movie. Audiences turned out to see the mash-up which became one of the highest-grossing movies in the series. Returning director Bryan Singer made a point of erasing Brett Ratner’s Last Stand from the shared continuity.

Which is how we get to Dark Phoenix. Fox felt like Days of Future Past had re-energized the series so they eagerly green-lit Singer’s follow-up movie, Apocalypse. But franchise fatigue had officially set in and Apocalypse became one of the lowest-performing X-Men movies.

Fox was facing a situation similar to what Sony went through with Spider-Man. They were desperate to build a superhero franchise to rival Marvel but they had no idea of how to do it. There saving grace proved to be one-off R-rated movies like Deadpool and Logan. Movies that probably wouldn’t have been made if Fox wasn’t floundering with the main series.

With Disney and Comcast in a bidding war over the rights, it became pretty obvious that Fox wasn’t going to be steering the franchise much longer. Simon Kinberg, who had written last stand and produced all of the movies with the reboot cast, wanted one more crack at the classic Dark Phoenix Saga.

There were tons of problems with this concept not least of which was that the movies hadn’t built up to the Phoenix storyline at all. But that’s a topic for another day.