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.

X-men Month - Mini Review: The Wolverine

The Wolverine was the 2013 entry and the x-men franchise and served as a kind of filler event between first class and 2014’s X-men: Days of Future Past (we’ll get to that next week) production began immediately after the release of X-men origins wolverine and it went through several drafts and directors as is not unusual for the X-men movies to do.

Produced on $120m budget, this movie had a decent run with around $420m at the box office and was better received critically than its predecessor with a 70% rating on rotten tomatoes and a 6.7 on IMDb.

What are my thoughts on the movie? Let’s dive in.

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men: The Last Stand

And so we have come to the third entry to the Franchise and possibly one of the more infamous ones. X-men: The Last Stand was released in 2006 and it had a hell of a production history. Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two movies left to direct Superman returns instead… You’d think that’d be the obvious way to go but Superman returns received a mixed reception and made less money than this movie.

Beyond that, the main actors were only contracted for 2 films, so their contracts had to be renewed, for Hugh Jackman that meant getting director approval. Matthew Vaughn was assigned to direct when they entered pre-production but family issues meant he departed before filming started. In the end they hired Brett Ratner, who really didn’t know a lot about the X-men.

In the writing department we have Simon Kinberg, who at that point had written Fantastic 4 and Elektra… Be afraid…

And of course we have studio interference as well, with a lot of the original elements for Jean Grey’s role ordered to be cut down because it was considered too dark for a summer blockbuster. They also killed for major character deaths and I’ll get to that in the story section.

Which is right now, so take a look at X-men 3

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