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: 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

Guilty Pleasures #27 - X-men Month - X-men: Days of Future Past

We’ve reached the conclusion of Hugh Jackm… I mean X-men month with the most recent X-men movie on DVD, it’s X-men: Days of Future Past. And helping things along is the return of Bryan Singer as director, his last X-men film was the best of the ones so far, being X-men 2.

I must admit, like the other X-men movies, I didn’t see this in the cinema, seeing a teaser for it as a mid-credits scene in the Amazing Spider-man 2 (Mark Webb was under contract with Fox at the time, but was allowed to work on this film in exchange for that) kinda rubbed me the wrong way at the time, instead I waited until it was out on DVD.

In terms of audience reaction, it’s probably got the best up there with 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (at time of writing matching Captain America: Civil war and up there with the Dark Knight and the Avengers, 2 of my absolute favourite movies. Oh and also Iron Man, which was good… I need to do a Marvel theme month, I mean actual Marvel, not Fox or Sony Marvel.

Anyway, it’s also the most successful of the X-men movies, earning $750m at the box office on a $200m budget.

But let’s take a look at the movie itself and see how it holds up. For the record I’m not using the extended version because I don’t have that DVD.

X-men Month - Mini Review: X-men: First Class

If you thought we were done with prequels, you were wrong as they decided to look a little more in-depth at the relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto that would ultimately lead them to become the ultimate frenemies.

X-men First Class was the 2011 entry to the X-men series, Bryan Singer is back but not as a director as he had other projects to attend to. He instead served as a co-writer and producer to the movie. The director? Michael Vaughn, the guy originally intending to direct the Last Stand.

Produced on an estimated $140-160m budget, they move was reasonably successful, earning $350m for Fox and that’s enough that persuaded them to continue on with the movie making and ultimately make 2 sequels to it (possibly more, you never know) one a hybrid with the old-x-men movies with the purpose of cutting out the originals from continuity.

It’s also the first X-men movie I ever watched. It was universally acclaimed at the time with an 86% rotten tomatoes rating, 65% on metacritic and an average 7.8/10 on IMDb. What’s my thoughts, well let’s take a look.

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