Due to several traumatic experiences during my childhood, I only have a few pleasant memories that are not completely fragmented that I can draw upon every now and again. Some would say it’s “repressed memory,” or “Lacunar amnesia.” Whatever the case, I’m not about to pay a psychologist $350 per hour in order to retrieve memories I probably don’t even want.
However, one of the few good memories during my childhood I still have intact was reading the X-Men comics late at night and watching the cartoons early Saturday morning in my pajamas with a giant bowl of cereal, the entire box to my left and the gallon of milk to my right. I can’t tell you how many bowls of cereal I went through those mornings, only that it was pointless for me to put the milk back in the refrigerator. I was like a drunkard at a bar binge drinking, “Bartender . . . just leave the bottle.”
So you could imagine when 20th Century Fox announced that they were going to make X-Men into a feature film it brought back memories of everything I read in the comics and watched in the shows. It also brought back memories of my cereal/milk binging days.
In the summer of 2000, X-Men the movie was released. Directed by Bryan Singer, it provided a solid foundation for future X-Men movies. The movie itself wasn’t spectacular and it had a few issues, which I won’t get into here, but it was solid and I enjoyed it. Remember, we were still trying to recover from the Joel Schumacher vomit-awful Batman movies that nearly torpedoed the entire comic book movie genre. So “solid” was a good start.
In the summer of 2003, Fox (not surprisingly) released a sequel called X2: X-Men United. Now this film has been one of the few sequels to surpass its’ predecessor in both quality and box office success. The characters were well-developed, the dialogue was good, and it had a decent story. I really liked this movie. Nightcrawer’s opening action sequence in the White House to start the narrative was lights out! The ending also left you excited for future installments.
The X-Men franchise was clearly on solid footing and I couldn’t be more excited to see what the future of X-Men movies had to offer. The franchise took an interesting turn, however, when Bryan Singer decided to jump ship from the franchise that he helped launch into comic book movie glory and went to another beloved comic book character, Superman. Singer said that it was always a boyhood dream to be able to direct a Superman movie. I wonder if those dreams included running the storied character into the ground and the film being both highly criticized and a box office failure? I’m referring to “Superman Returns” in 2006. This was an amazing feet because Warner Bros. has been trying for years to get this franchise off the ground again.
Singer’s actions also had an adverse effect on the X-Men franchise because he left. As a result of his leaving, Fox had to rush the production, complete what was left of the story, and hire a director (Brett Ratner in this case) to pick up the pieces. In 2006, “X-Men: The Last Stand” was released and it was just down right crappy. There’s really no other way to put it. It was so awful that it nearly retrofected my good childhood memories of the X-Men by threatening to turn them into a traumatic experience. Brett Ratner was an awful director but I don’t blame him entirely considering the circumstances.
Of course Fox realized that the X-Men brand was a cash cow and continued to produce X-Movies in the form of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and X-Men: First Class (2011). Wolverine was awful and a sequel, The Wolverine, is due for release some time in 2013. Since I felt like I’ve been burned by the last two X-Movies, I decided to wait for First Class to go to DVD in order to rent it. A franchise can only burn its customers for so long and get away with it. After watching it the other night, I was left unimpressed. Singer came back as a producer for First Class and I was hoping he could help recapture the magic of the first two films. Nope.
First Class was not only a disappointing movie (although Michael Fassbender as a young Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto was outstanding) but it was a disappointment on how the X-Franchise took a turn for the worst. Why do good movie franchises inevitably run themselves into the ground? Maybe it’s all the red tape a film has to go through and all the hands that have to get involved, from the studios, producers, writers, etc. Maybe it’s the system of the film industry that’s broken? Whatever the case, it’s unfortunate.
Is there a lesson in all of this? I say yes. When you have a vision or project, stay the course in much the same way that Christopher Nolan’s reboot Batman franchise has. Nolan has clearly said that his third Bat-film will be his last and that he will bring the trilogy to its conclusion. He started something and now he’s going to finish it. I have no doubts that The Dark Knight Rises will be epic on many levels. It makes me think of things I’ve started and have yet to finish or even things I want to start but wonder if I’ll finish. In either case, regarding my life, I would much rather be a visionary like Chris Nolan, rising a franchise back from the dead and seeing it from start to finish, instead of a short-sighted Bryan Singer, leaving a franchise for dead.
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