R.I.P. The X-Men Movie Universe — 2000 - 2019

[Benjamin Haines]

[jellydonut25]

[Specium Ray]

Maybe it's my age showing, but I think modern superhero movies are pretty damn faithful to the source material. Tim Burton read Dark Knight Returns and was inspired to make a Batman movie. And he made a good movie, it just doesn't resemble DKR at all. Zak Snyder made practically a panel-for-panel remake of the Watchmen and it was unbearable. Film and comics are two different mediums and what works in one does not necessarily work in the other.

Marvel has proven time and again that mass audiences are showing up for that deep nerd stuff. From the moment I heard Grant Gustin say "speed force" on national TV, I knew we were on another level.

[mr.negativity]

[Benjamin Haines]

Now here's an ambitious choice!

Deadline:

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

[Benjamin Haines]

Hell yeah, a Gambit movie on my 30th birthday and a New Mutants trailer this Friday!

[jellydonut25]

At this point, Gambit is like a Del Toro movie for me: I’ll believe it when I’m watching it.

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

James Franco, Simon Kinberg, ‘Wonder Woman’ Scribe Allan Heinberg Team On Fox’s Marvel Mutant ‘Multiple Man’

[Benjamin Haines]

[mr.negativity]

[Benjamin Haines]

This is wild! It raises so many questions.

What is up with The New Mutants? We were just three months away from its April 13 release date, we've already gotten the first trailer and poster, and now it's been bumped all the way to February of next year. Is this change purely about accommodating Deadpool 2's new release date, as that THR article suggests, or is this a sign of late-game retooling on the film?

As for Deadpool 2, holy moly! I guess Stacey Snider and other Fox executives/marketers haven't suddenly decided to be Disney's new best friends in the wake of the pending merger. Now Deadpool 2 will open just two weeks after Avengers: Infinity War and one week before Solo: A Star Wars Story. That is a bold move that projects an air of confidence about the film's potential, and rightfully so. Infinity War is probably going to perform much like Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, with a robust opening weekend and then relatively short legs as it plays mainly to audiences who have already been following the MCU. Solo's box office potential is a giant question mark but it's still likely to play mainly to the Star Wars faithful no matter how big its opening weekend. Deadpool 2 is the sequel to one of 2016's biggest breakout hits and it actually has the potential to do better than its predecessor with general audiences. I do wonder if Disney will respond by bumping Solo to December like their other Star Wars movies.

Will Gambit ever get made or not? Gore Verbinski is the third director to sign onto this project and later drop out, after Doug Liman quit in August 2016 and Rupert Wyatt quit in September 2015. If it does end up playing in theaters in summer 2019, Gambit will have been four years in the making by that time.

I think it's interesting how, out of the four X-Men franchise projects that Fox is currently working on, Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix is the only one that didn't get moved around. It's currently staying put with a November 2 release date.

[mr.negativity]

[Benjamin Haines]

Oh yeah, we can't have a movie featuring actors who have done cocaine or other drugs. Not in Hollywood.


One rumor I've read is that Fox wants to make The New Mutants scarier and have it really embrace the horror genre. I've seen YouTube trailer compilations of upcoming 2018 horror films and they've included this teaser, so maybe Fox is worried that they've got a horror event on their hands that might not be horrific enough or scary enough for fans of the genre. That's what killed word-of-mouth for Crimson Peak in 2015. Maybe Fox is trying to bump The New Mutants up from a targeted PG-13 to an R rating so it can have the same 'not holding anything back' vibe as Deadpool and Logan.

[lhb412]

[Benjamin Haines]

^ Indeed, Crimson Peak toes the line between period drama and period horror but it's a story of romance more than anything. A movie like that never really had the potential to be a big mainstream hit in this era but it could have been marketed the way Fox Searchlight has handled The Shape of Water. Putting Crimson Peak in nearly 3,000 theaters during the Halloween season was not the way to go.

Also, it had a $55 million production budget, which was just irresponsible. Spending so much on an original romance/drama/horror film that it needed to gross north of $135m worldwide just to break even was a recipe for disaster. Del Toro makes great films but they tend to be too expensive for their own good and end up kneecapping their potential profitability. Crimson Peak cost more than double the $20m that Warner Bros. / New Line spent to make The Conjuring two years prior. Crimson Peak's $74m worldwide haul would have been profitable on a $20m budget.


On that note, I hope Fox's potential retooling of The New Mutants doesn't drive the budget up into stupid territory.

[Benjamin Haines]

[Dai]

[mr.negativity]

[mr.negativity]

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is More 'Grounded' Than Past Movies


X-Men: Dark Phoenix Is 'Darker' Than Apocalypse

[lhb412]

Wow, I'm watching X-Men Apocalypse on FX and it's amazing how cheap this movie looks. It feels a bit like a tokusatsu movie... only not as fun, and without the consistent visual style and fight choreography.

[O.Supreme]

DofP had such a great ending, then Apocalypse had to go and screw it all up again. I love how in their attempt to mock X-Men Thee Last Stand, they actually trolled themselves.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ How does Apocalypse screw up Days of Future Past? I can see that point of view with regard to Logan since it's set after DoFP in another bleak future but what does Apocalypse do to screw anything up? It's set in 1983.


^^ I love the tokusatsu-style costumes and designs for Apocalypse and his four horsemen. X-Men: Apocalypse is the most unabashedly cartoony of the ensemble X-Men movies.