A little background music. Just let this play in the background while you read this piece.
Yes, Variety is reporting that director Bryan Singer has signed on to helm X-Men: First Class, a prequel to the X-Men movies, focusing on the first years of that wacky mutant school. Here's a little history - get ready for me to flex my movie-news-nerd muscles:
Singer directed the first X-Men movie, which you could argue was the first good comic book movie. Its success is what started the whole superhero movie boom - it didn't shatter any records, but it turned a pretty good profit, and that's what made Fox put out Spider-Man, and then, yknow, everything else happened. Singer also directed the second X-Men movie, which was totally awesome. Here comes the drama: while prepping what would have probably been an amazing third movie, Warner Brothers (rival of Fox, who owns the X-Men franchise) offered him Superman Returns, and he jumped at the chance, saying he'd still do X-Men 3 afterwards. Fox got pissed and fired him, and then rushed into production on X-Men 3 for the sole purpose of beating Superman Returns to the box office. That's why X-Men 3 sucked so bad (oh, god, did it suck). What made this worse was that Superman Returns also totally sucked (there wasn't even a single fight scene in that 2.5 hour movie), so everybody lost, with the exception of the Fox studio heads when X-Men 3 still banked and Superman Returns tanked. And then we got Wolverine, which was the absolute bottom of the barrel, seriously painful to sit through shitty movie. I never thought I'd stop thinking Wolverine was cool, but here I am.
Hoo. I'm a little out of breath from all that. Anyway, I'm hoping Singer was just good at making X-Men movies, because for some reason Fox has welcomed him back for this new one. I think the story's kind of stupid and I don't really care how the school got started up, I'd rather see the main characters I love in a good movie again, but after Wolverine I'll honestly take anything as long as it doesn't hurt me as much as sitting through that. That movie was astonishingly stupid. Melodramatic, corny, pretty much the antithesis of what made the first two X-Men movies so good. I don't want to see Wolverine cry. He's supposed to be this hardened badass who can't even age or die, so he's just amazing at killing people.
I also don't want to see a million stupid cameos of different characters from the comics just for the sake of having them in there - tell a story, and only include the characters who are important to that story. It's just condescending to throw in Gambit in the third act "for the fans." It's clearly a demand of the studio - the whole fucking narrative of that movie was like a list of studio demands. "Gotta have some action, some fighting, but keep it PG-13, and we gotta have a love story. Gotta bring in the tween crowd and appeal to everybody. Oh, and those nerd-boys in the audience? Fuck 'em, they're easy. Just shoehorn in some of the funnybook characters and they'll be happy as pigs in shit."
Stupid, stupid, stupid.Hopefully, Singer'll avoid that, but I don't know, he might not want to get fired again.
No comments:
Post a Comment