In case you missed it, after years of fiddle-faddle, malarkey, and refusal to commit, the MCU has finally started to make strides towards bringing the X-Men into the fold. Can this new take on the Children of the Atom beat Fox’s nigh-on 20 year cinematic epic?
No, no it can’t, and here are three reasons why not.
The thrill is gone
The term “superhero fatigue” is overused enough that “superhero fatigue fatigue” might be the new buzz word. Sadly, it’s also a term that exists for a reason.
When Wolverine flew through the windshield of his pickup truck and skidded face-first across the asphalt in the first X-Men movie, it was unlike anything audiences had ever seen. It was an era when technology was finally catching up with fantasy, and the world that superhero fans had only been able to imagine for decades was finally coming to life. We were reliving the moment when 19th century theatergoers freaked out at the train coming at the screen, but this time with an Australian guy in flannel.
A few years later, network TV exercise-in-diminishing-returns Heroes recreated the effect on a nearly weekly basis with Claire Bennett. A few years after that, save for scenes in Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy where the process was so over-the-top it bordered on satire or body horror, CGI shots of characters healing super-fast had become so tired that nobody bothered with them anymore.
And that’s the problem that any X-Men reboot is going to have to dodge: that the original films, for all their sins, were iconic. Get big enough and everyone starts to steal from you, until the things you innovated become hacky templates of the genre and a dramatic return just feels like you’re stealing from yourself.
The MCU lacks conviction
The MCU is driven by a dark and foreboding mission statement, necessarily striving to convince their audience that they’re not just moving forward, they’re moving forward with purpose. There’s an end goal in mind, a narrative exit ramp at which years of buildup can find their destination. One day, there will be another Avengers, another Endgame, that will make the investment of your time worth it. They might not know what that looks like right now, but they’ll take every precaution necessary to protect their beloved IPs for as long as it takes to get there.
Want to know what the end goal of Fox’s X-Men franchise was? More X-Men franchise, that’s what. It was a perpetual motion machine that made no promises of satisfactory conclusions, narrative detente, or even film-to-film continuity. It was a terrible, uncaring juggernaut of the studio system, where sweeping, stupid choices were made. Xavier could show up, digitally de-aged by a madman with an airbrush, walking around in the ‘80s at the beginning of The Last Stand, then lose the use of his legs in the ‘60s two movies later. Kitty Pryde was played by different performers in three consecutive films. Angel was in his 20s in 2006, then a teenager in the ‘80s. It was like the whole series was being written under the law of the Assassin’s Creed.
And that sort of wild-eyed carelessness gave us some of the worst superhero movies of the last 20 years. It also gave us some of the best. The MCU wouldn’t have given the green light to an R-rated Deadpool threequel if someone at Fox hadn’t said “Fine, do whatever you want” almost a decade prior. In a world where Wolverine was in the Marvel Cinematic Universe all along, we might not have gotten X-Men Origins, but we definitely wouldn’t have had Logan, either. With no threat of lapsing rights looming over their heads, Disney will never give us the panicked, frenetic X-Men adaptations that Fox did – not the cringe ones, and definitely not the ones brave enough to try something new.
The MCU won’t have an increasingly disinterested Jennifer Lawrence putting less and less effort into the gig until she’s barely showing up for work almost a decade later
The X-Men movies got bad. It’s not a secret. By Dark Phoenix, it was clear that the franchise was never going to recover. Of the post-Apocalypse films, very little was watchable, let alone enjoyable.
But do you know what was enjoyable? Watching one of Hollywood’s biggest stars sink deeper and deeper into an ill-advised, multi-picture contract. Seeing the commensurate dissipation of craps she had to give in relation to the number of days when she had to be painted into her costume, all while the writers kept shoehorning more and more of her character into the series despite her having had like, four lines in the last trilogy. Being aware of all of that was like watching a separate movie, constructed just for you.
Also, to be clear, this isn’t a “hating Jennifer Lawrence” thing. It’s funny when anyone has to wear face paint that they hate to work, regardless of whether or not they starred in mother!
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