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 Origins Wolverine

If there’s one thing everyone knows about Wolverine it’s that he has a mysterious past. He doesn’t remember it and ultimately it’s the key to his character development as he finds out answers piece by piece. Unfortunately, they felt the need to give us an origin story instead.

X-men Origins Wolverine came out in 2009, again, 3 years after the last X-men movie (the Spider-man movies were released in 2002, 2004 and 2007) and despite the large gap, the writing was already underway in 2004. Man, they sure took their time with this one. Gavin Hood was chosen as director despite not being a comic book fan. *sighs* You know, with Brett Ratner he wasn’t a first choice because the actual director had to leave. Here, they deliberately chose a non-comic fan to helm a comic book adaptation. Be afraid

It made money about $370million, but it was blasted by critics holding 38% on Rotten tomatoes, a massive step down from even X-men 3, 6.7 on IMDb and 40% on Metacritic. What do I think? 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.