So What The Fox Is X-Men First Class?
Cover via Amazon
X-Men: First Class has to be one of the most controversial superhero movies ever made. After the last two mediocre X-Men films, The last Stand and Origins seamlessly destroyed the X-Men franchise, fans everywhere were calling for a reboot. So when Fox announces a new film titled X-Men First Class you would assume we would be getting a reboot based on the First Class comic by Jeff Parker.
Fox had other plans.
Directed by the man who famously dropped out of X3 :The last Stand, Matthew Vaughn teams up with ex director Bryan Singer to deliver a prequel with tints of reboot set before the original X-Men movie. If you know your X-Men comics or remember X-Men the movie, you’d know Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, Iceman and Angel were meant to be Professor X‘s first students. Not in Fox world.
Instead, we’re getting an all-new roster opening up a can of continuity errors. The roster of the First Class film consists of Professor X, Magneto, Havok (Cyclops’s brother yet father somehow), Mystique, Beast, Banshee, Emma Frost and Moira MacTaggert. Let’s go through the mistakes so far.
Havok (Alex Summers) is meant to be Cyclops’s younger brother in the comics. In the film he is clearly a teenager so if Havok was a teenager in the 60’s that would make him old enough to be Cyclops’s dad in film continuity.
Beast is seen in the First Class film as undergoing the transformation from human Hank McCoy to mutant Beast. If Beast turns blue in First Class how does that account for the Hank McCoy we saw in X2 in human form?
Emma Frost was clearly seen in X-Men Origins (set in 1979, same time as the Three Mile Island disaster), as a young woman played by Tahyna Tozzi. Fox seem to think audiences will just accept the previous incarnation of Emma we saw is just a mutant running around with almost identical powers and a very similar appearance.
Professor X (played by James McAvoy) is also young, cocky, fully haired and walking. They’ve essential stripped Xavier of his character completely. Plus, we saw Xavier rescue the students from X-Men Origins as a middle aged, bald, walking man. Marvel Studios seem perfectly able to stick to their widespread continuity. Why can’t Fox manage to give a single franchise such as X-Men a consistent continuity.
The film will make enough money to prevent it from being a flop. The X-Men franchise has proven to be a big draw to audiences in the past therefore it’s unlikely the movie will tank. By infuriating loyal X-Men fans across the country however may have damaged the movie’s chance of success more than Fox anticipated. Fan sites across the net are calling for boycotts to the First Class movie and credit to them; I can see their point. These are people that buy the comic books, love the characters, only to see them misinterpreted on screen. If they do press ahead with their boycotts it could be a big hit for the First Class movie.
My opinion is split down the middle. Whilst I’m really interested in how X-Men First Class has set itself alongside the Cuban Missile Crisis giving it an historic twist, I also think maybe a boycott will finally stop Fox from producing terrible X-Men movies, and the rights will revert back to Marvel Studios.
Let me known what you think; are you happy with what Fox have given us so far? Or do you think Marvel Studious should have the rights to the X-Men movies back?
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