Sequel Month - Mini Review - X-men Apocalypse

Last year I did X-men month where I looked at all the X-men movies that had come out, except for this one, which hadn’t come out on DVD yet. I will get to Logan eventually, but know that it’s a great movie, so is Deadpool, but that is not the movie I’m here to talk about today. X-men Apocalypse came out in July of 2016 to a very mixed reception. It made $544 million on a $185m budget, this is not as good as Fox were hoping for, but enough to justify another sequel coming out next year.

4 issue test #36 - Champions

OK Marvel, we need to talk. In 2015 you did Secret Wars III, in 2016 you did Civil War II because the movie was coming out and in the wake of that, you’ve done a relaunch, only a year after the last one! Marvel Now (yet another recycled title) launched a few new titles with new creative teams. Unlike with DC Rebirth and the last Marvel relaunch, I’ve been more cautious picking new titles. There are only 2 I plan to cover. One is Jessica Jones (next week my friends) we also have Champions

And yes, it’s another title with the younger Avengers written by Mark Waid, who was less than impressive with his All New All Different Avengers title. But Waid still has some residual goodwill from Archie to allow me to give this a fair shot. Is it worth the read? Let’s take a look

X-men Month: TV Retrospective - Wolverine and the X-men

We finish X-men month with a look at the most recent of the X-men animated series: Wolverine and the X-men

Released in 2009, this series was a kind of bridge between the X-men movies and the comics universe. There isn’t a lot of shared continuity between the movies and this comics, it’s more about design choices (Wolverine particularly looks like his Hugh Jackman counterpart and considerably taller than his comic counterpart)

Heralding this is a focus on Wolverine because of his popularity from 3 x-men movies and a solo movie coming out the same year. So, is it any good? Let’s take a look

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men 2 (X2: X-men United)

We rejoin the action in X-men month

X-men was both critically and commercially successful so a sequel was inevitable, but it took its sweet ass time getting to us, it was May 2003 before the sequel aired. The script underwent various rewrites (and I’m taking my info from Wikipedia so make of it what you will) cutting out minor characters (Angel and Beast were supposed to appear) and giving Storm more screen time after Halle Berry’s success in Monster’s Ball, which won her an academy award, can we retroactively take that back after Catwoman?

  

Relax! I’m kidding. Released in May 2003 on a $110 million budget it managed to score around $410m, another tidy profit for Fox and enough that they continue the franchise in a third movie which I’ll cover later this week. It met with positive reviews with a 86% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and an average 7.5/10 on IMDb, both improvements over the first one. But let’s take a look for ourselves.

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men

It’s July, you know what that means, X-men month

Yes, I have to start by apologising that this will be almost entirely be mini reviews. I thought I might have been able to get a rage out of 3 and Origins: Wolverine but the truth is I kinda liked them and I’m not sure there’s any ground other reviewers haven’t already established. That’s not to say they’re not flawed (in many very obvious ways) but that’s for those reviews.

Just FYI, despite the X-men cameos, I’m not covering Deadpool. But if you’d like my views them I’ll briefly say overall, I enjoyed the film but it was very much what I expected out of the film and not much more. Kudos to the marketing department for helping make it a massive success.

I’m also not covering Apocalypse. I’m writing this in April, in fact 2 weeks after I should’ve done it really so I’ve not got the time to be covering a movie not even out yet.

Also, also, there will be a 4 issue test of Power Man and Iron Fist coming out this month, I know it’s late since #4 was out in May but I haven’t had anywhere else to put it. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at X-men