The Big Picture - The Failure of ‘Dark Phoenix' and the End of X-Men Movies ... For Now | Exit Survey

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to dive deep on the existing X-Men franchise, a two-decade-long series of movies that have seldom delivered but still grabbed our attention. Then, the two review the newly released “Dark Phoenix” and speculate over the direction Disney will take with X-Men’s intellectual property. Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. It's Liz Kelley, host of Tea Time. Exciting news happening across the podcast network. Your favorite celebrity and pop culture podcasts are moving out of Channel 33 and into their very own feed called Ringer Dish. On Ringer Dish, you can still listen to Jam Session on Wednesdays and Tea Time on Fridays, and we'll be launching a brand new show that'll publish every Monday, starting with a deep dive on J-Lo and Ben Affleck's infamous relationship hosted by Amanda Dobbins and Juliette Lipman. So to hear more about the royal family

and our current celebrity obsessions, subscribe to Ringer Dish on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fantasy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about evil mutants. I am joined by my brother and the brotherhood of evil mutants. It's Chris Ryan. Hello. Oh man, what's up, man? How are you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm doing really well because I'm here to talk to you about a 20-year movie franchise that is concluding this week, this Friday. It doesn't feel like it's been 20 years. It feels like some of them took place in like the mid 80s and then it like jumped ahead to now,

which is, I guess, appropriate for the time traveling shenanigans that happen in these movies. Yes, of course, we're talking about X-Men Dark Phoenix and the entire X-Men franchise. And boy, the timing of this is curious for myriad reasons, not just because it feels like time is a confusing aspect of all X-Men stories, but we are living in a comic book franchised universe truly. We have expanded into this universe fully as moviegoers. And the new movie, which we'll talk about, I think, mostly in the back half of this conversation, I would say left a little something to be desired, maybe a lot to be desired. Not exactly the way we want a big story like this to go out. Also a bit curious since we've already seen this story once before in this franchise. Yes. This is quite a, you might say a bit of a mutant of a collection of movies. I mean, the way that this has played out over the last 19 years is fascinating. I guess I know for a fact that you are a sincere X-Men fan. For sure. I think that's your kind of core comic book, right?

They were my gateway drug, but also my addiction. Interesting. So I've always been deeply invested with the X-Men as a comics. And I never had that relationship to the characters that we associate with the MCU. So I was never like an Iron Man guy or a Captain America guy. I never really cared about the Avengers or Thor or anything. I mean, I like those comics when I've come across them. But X-Men was the way

in which I got into comic books and was pretty obsessed with a couple of those storylines, for sure, especially in the 90s. Yeah, you burst into the studio this morning and you said, damn, I just plowed through the Executioner song.

So you can, there's not a plug, but Marvel has a really good app. And you can read comics through the Marvel app. You can just buy them on your iPad. And it's, a plug, but Marvel has a really good app. And you can read comics through the Marvel app. You can just buy them on your iPad. And I love print as much as the next 41-year-old person, but it's a really, really easy-to-use application. And then you start just basically going back through, and I have a bunch saved up in my library in that.

And I was just going through Executioner's Song and Age of Apocalypse, and I was like, this is my shit. I really love these stories. Yeah, I had the same thing. I recently was going through Executioner's Song and Age of Apocalypse. And I was like, this is my shit. I really love these stories. Yeah, I had the same thing. I recently was going through an old collection of comic books as a kid that I had saved somehow in my mom's basement and just started reading and had sense memory. It was like back where I wanted to be with it. And I would say that the movies themselves never quite recaptured that exact experience. Though I think it's easy to forget how good and revolutionary

and important, frankly, these movies were. I have a theory, which is that this is the most important franchise to come along since Star Wars. That's really interesting. Because obviously where it's at now and the way that Apocalypse was received and the way that Dark Phoenix is already being received, we're really kicking this thing to the side and saying like, these movies aren't good. But once upon a time, certainly the first X-Men film, but then X2 was radical and felt radical. And this was before Spider-Man. This was certainly before the MCU. This was before a lot of what we perceive as superhero culture. And these movies, I think more than I had realized as I've been revisiting them, set the template for what the MCU was going to do.

They did and then the things that they didn't do were fascinating as well. So some of the franchise serialized storytelling that Marvel has essentially perfected, especially since probably Winter Soldier. Yes. X-Men is incapable of doing and there's little things that Marvel does

that the X-Men franchise just never really got straight. And, you know, it was interesting. I was going to come in here with this big spiel about there's all this behind-the-scenes drama with these X-Men movies, and Fox always made them make them fast, and there was budget crunches, and release date deadlines.

All that stuff is true for Marvel. I mean, think about Edgar Wright. Think about like, oh, this movie is going to come out then, or we had to reshoot this ending and they had to shoot this before they made Infinity War. And so they didn't even know who Captain Marvel really was when they were making the last two Avengers movies. All that stuff happens with MCU, but they understand two things, I think. One, how to tell a story over multiple films. And they do the Wu-Tang thing of the group and the solo album really, really well. Yes.

And obviously, X-Men never really got a chance beyond Wolverine to do that. And two, they knew how to tell a comic book story to non-comic book fans, I think. And that means that whereas in the X-Men movies, you have dozens seemingly of random people with face paint on, with powers you don't really understand, whose name maybe never gets mentioned. Marvel doesn't make those mistakes. There's not some random guy whose tongue moves really far that you're like, who's this guy? And he never shows up in another movie. They don't waste your time. For as long as those movies can be, they don't waste your time. So it's really, really interesting in preparation for this podcast to go back through these movies and be like, oh, you guys were the canary in the coal mine.

Like you got some things right. You got some things wrong. But you were really an interesting barometer for what was to come. Totally. Guinea pig. Guinea pig. And if you look at the way that the MCU operates, it is largely up through specifically Kevin Feige and his desire to create the story in the way that they're doing it. And then the reporters report to him, excuse me, the directors report to him,

the producers report to him, the writers report to him. There is a closed system. Now for years, Lauren Schuller Donner has been producing the X-Men movies, but she has empowered a lot of filmmakers and a lot of producers under her to have a big say in what happens in these movies. And so inevitably what happens is you get a lot of confusing stuff. Now, I will say, at first I was going to come into this film and this series highly critical of the fact that they have not been able to manage their timelines. And so what you have now is you have old Ian McKellen playing Magneto and you have young Michael Fassbender playing Magneto. That's confusing because in the events in Dark Phoenix, eight years later, Michael Fassbender needs to look like Ian McKellen for everything to make sense. So there's all sorts of issues like

that that are just confounding. On the other hand, whereas MCU is this streamlined, brilliantly operated, clean experience, comic books are not that. Alternate timelines are the bread and butter of comic books. So the X-Men movies sort of not being chronologically coherent isn't actually a problem. Yeah, and I would also say, especially with X-Men, part of the draw is storylines like Cable's time-jumping storyline, or even some of the more just hallucinatory storylines, like in the Dark Phoenix comics, if I'm remembering this right,

you know, there's like a whole Jean Grey thinks she's in, what is it, like turn of the century England or something like that. And they're manipulating her mind, but she's having, I think, issues, long visions of an alternative world that she's living in. That's part of the reason why I fell in love with the comics, because you have some things that when you're a kid and when you're like 13 14 they pander to you and they're like they're playing to your interests and they're at your humor level and that plots at your basically your intellect level but then there are some things that are like oh wait i don't really understand what's going on here but i'm into it you know this love triangle between scott gene

and logan i don't get it but it seems really interesting and you know a lot of the stuff that's happening like that you get introduced to introduced to in these comic books, you're like, why is this? So there's a woman named Madeline who looks just like Jean. And it's like, it's basically Vertigo. You know, it's pretty wild. Yeah, there's a really interesting story on The Ringer right now by Thomas Golanopoulos about the long heritage of the Dark Phoenix saga and Chris Claremont and John Byrne and how they created it and how the effort to adapt this story is very complex

largely because of what you're saying. It's hugely expansive. In total, the whole, whole saga covers 40 issues. But the compressed Dark Phoenix saga

is 10 issues of a comic book. And, you know, comic books can do whatever they want. And movies, I think the original X-Men movies,

about 2000, is when CGI finally came to the place where... Yeah, I really want to talk about this. And movies, I think the original X-Men movies, about 2000, is when CGI finally came to the place where- Yeah, I really want to talk about this. You know, like, finally, this could make sense and work. I think with the exception of probably Terminator 2. If you go back to any movie from those periods, they just don't work. They don't look good. They're not as effective. Particularly in X2 and X3, it starts to make sense that there can be an X-Men movie. Yes. And yet it's still wild to look back almost as recently as, I mean, honestly, as recently as Apocalypse, but just seeing some of the technical and visual choices that they make

and how inappropriate they would be in a Marvel movie. Well, how do you mean? Explain that. Mystique. You know what I mean? Like I mean? Regardless of the fact that it's just a naked blue woman, but just even the way in which mystique functions or the way in which apocalypse functions, think of the differences mildly, even though they're very similar between Thanos and apocalypse. And the way in which, A, they were distributed over multiple movies to build up tension that this thing was coming. But B, they didn't show it until they were ready to show it until they were ready to show it because they needed to get Thanos' look right. They needed to understand his physics,

his dynamics. They fucking just put Oscar Isaac in a glue suit and they were like, go out there, man. And he's got some hilarious interviews about what that was like to make that. He was like, oh, I thought I was going to be in a movie with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. And they wound up like sealing me in like a polymer and putting me on a saddle and putting a cooling device up my butt so that I didn't overheat while we were shooting this thing. I think that that speaks to the high and the low aspect of X-Men in a big way. There is this inherent schlockiness to Halle Berry very earnestly delivering pretty bad dialogue. This happens kind of throughout the series.

And then on the other hand, you have these extraordinary sequences, maybe between McKellen and Patrick Stewart as these longtime friends, rivals, foes, frenemies, I guess the original frenemies, Charles Xavier and Eric Lynch. And it feels like you're watching something, you know, Shakespearean feels haughty and a bit overstated,

but significant, real, earned. And I've always been fascinated by this movie's inability to hold tone, to figure out what kind of movie it's supposed to be. Almost all of them, and I've now rewatched all of them. I think with the exception of Logan, that's the only consistent movie

that has been made throughout this entire series. And that's the one that a director got to say, Hugh Jackman and I will make this film. It's going to be our Do You Want It or Not. And a lot, if you read about the makings of these, the production of these movies, there's a lot of Frankensteining two comic stories together. There's even, I think in X2 even,

it's like Michael Dougherty retaking another Zach Penn script or two Zach Penn scripts and putting them together and taking a bunch of characters out. There's a lot of like, we don't know how to do this yet. And we don't know if we're going to make another one after this. So we're not sure what we can and can't show here. That's exactly right. I think if you look at the, if you, if you put, break it down into phases, the way that Kevin Feige might like you to do it, there's three phases of X-Men movies. And then there are some side stories. There is the first three X-Men movies, which is X-Men X2 and X-Men The Last Stand. And then there is that first Wolverine movie,

but mostly it's first class, the Wolverine, Days of Future Past. Those are my favorites. And then you have essentially Deadpool, X-Men Apocalypse, Logan, Dark Phoenix. Yeah. And I think I've just rewatched Days of Future Past and first class last night.

They're both very good. Those movies are good. And like, I forgot, I don't know whether I watched Days of Future Past on a plane or something, but I was watching,

I texted you last night. I was like, this is a really good movie. Yeah, I think it's notable that they're both period pieces. You and I are a bit of a sucker for a 60s and 70s story.

That's not lost on me that some of the affectation that surrounds the way that they tell the story. And you know, one of the complicating factors of this whole thing is who was in charge of the thing. And we should probably state that Bryan Singer is in many ways the godfather creatively of this series. Earlier this year, Singer was accused by three men in a story in the Atlantic of sexual assault and sexual misconduct. You know, we're not going to adjudicate Singer's case here, but it's inherent for us to just note that as we talk about these movies,

because in many ways, and you just cited this to me, and I think it's very smart. The studio and the producers are enthralled to whoever is coming in and out of these stories and telling them. And you can sense that when Matthew Vaughn comes in on First Class

and then Singer returns on Days of Future Past with a lot of power, that those are much more director-oriented stories. Yeah. And they make more sense. And even though they completely fracture all of this timeline chronology that we had been following through the first three or four films, they're just better made. They're more confident and they're more fun and they're clever. And they feel, even if they're not truly loyal to the storylines in the comic books, they feel more in keeping with the way that those stories are told. Why do you think that that stopped again? Why did that kind of start to fall apart again? I don't, I mean,

so I don't want to speculate too much about Singer, but if you read about the productions of these movies, you know, there's a lot of cases where either they had thought about going with a different director and Singer said he wanted to do it and they gave it to Singer or Singer was supposed to direct a movie and then backed out. Uh, and they had to bring someone else else in to do it. Um, you know, he didn't do Last Stand, which was famously offered or at least peddled to most of the directors in Hollywood, Peter Berg, Glenn Weissman, like a lot of the action or directors in Hollywood before it landed with Brett Ratner, who admittedly,

he was not very familiar with X-Men and was just going to kind of be shooting the script. It's notable that in that Golanopolis piece I mentioned that apparently the directive to fuse two stories and two scripts came from Tom Rothman, who was running Fox at the time. Yes, and Rothman pops up a bunch

of times in terms of a script will get going, like Benioff will write the first Wolverine movie, and he is a huge Wolverine fan, had been like for years basically angling to do this, writes a version of it, and then they bring in a guy named Skip Woods, who his credits are not quite as regal as David Benioff's, to basically make it more of a Fox action movie.

And a lot of the times you see, we had this idea to do it like this, but the studio wanted us to do it like this. And what's wild is that they just keep doing it over and over again. You know, this isn't like Heaven's Gate where Michael Cepino just disappears. Singer just comes back and does another one. He's like, oh, it didn't quite work out the way I wanted it to, but here I am again to try. Yeah. And those busted up chronologies, as we referenced earlier in the show, make that at least somewhat legible for the audience. But

it's a fascinating mistake for a studio to make over and over again. And it's in such stark contrast to the way that the MCU runs things which is so carefully plotted and these movies just seem to be happening I don't know like the flip of a coin in some ways you know yeah and even when you have something like uh Edgar Wright leaving Ant-Man or um perhaps Ryan Bowden and Anna Fleck not doing the the greatest job on Captain Marvel I can't speak to like exactly what happened there, but it feels like a movie that was certainly reshot and recut in different places. They still have a certain level of competency, which I think is derived mostly from the fact that

Marvel can always fall back on its sense of humor. And X-Men movies, I would say, are not very funny. Nor do they really try to be, nor are the X-Men comic books very funny. But we talked about this when we talked about Avengers back when you were doing the Marvel series on Big Picture. They can always be amusing. And that's a huge thing when you're in a movie theater for two and a half hours. But that, to me, is kind of shocking as a retired comic book reader. Because growing up, the X-Men were cool.

And they were young. And they were disaffected and, like, forgive the phrase, but a little bit punk relative to the Avengers who were older and who were not really a team. They were a bunch of individuated stories that got spun together. Yeah. And the X-Men, they were a team. Some of these characters are not strong enough, interesting enough to support their own stories, but largely because the idea of the collective and a band of outcasts coming together is what makes this story make so much sense. But I think that the other thing here is that it was casting is when they started making these movies in what, 2000, they weren't thinking about 20 years in the future.

They weren't like maybe Famke Johnson can carry like a multi-movie arc. They were like, let's make this movie and see if it makes any money. Oh, it did. Let's make another one. Wow, people think that's Empire Strikes Back. Third one's a disaster. And then they're like, you know what? We can't make a Magneto movie. Ian McKellen's too old. Ian McKellen can't get up on wires and go flying over

anything. We have to figure out a way to reboot. Luckily for them, there's tons of reboots and timeline shifting and go back to your younger self stuff in this comics. And that's why I thought First Class was so brilliant. Furthermore, First Class shot by the guy who shot Gladiator looks great. It looks like way better than any other X-Men movie. And the only thing I'm disappointed about with Days of Future Past is that Vaughn didn't get a chance to direct that because I think Days of Future Past actually has some of the charm of Vaughn and Goldman, Jane Goldman's script from First Class. And they did a version

of Days of Future Past script. I don't know who wound up eventually getting all the writing credits. But if Matthew Vaughn had directed Days of Future Past, I think that's in the running for like top five superhero movie. It's interesting. Having just seen Past. I think that's in the running for like top five superhero movie. It's interesting. Having just seen it, I think there are parts of it that work really well. And there are parts of it that I can't quite understand. Let's talk a little bit about the actors and the characters and the way that they fit together. Because that's even relevant to me to Days of Future Past.

Because you mentioned Mystique earlier. I just don't think of Mystique historically as a very important character. And somehow she has become the third most important character, maybe the fourth. It's obvious why, right? But even in the original films before Jennifer Lawrence comes along, they put a lot of weight into Rebecca Romijn Stamos. Rebecca Romijn Stamos, for those

who may not be familiar, was a supermodel who married John Stamos and became a successful actress. She's not really done very much as an actress. But because there was something so visually striking about her and because I think they needed to give Magneto a sort of evil sidekick she took this place of importance

and it has always been very confusing to me and she really is, she's the pinnacle character, the clutch character in Days of Future Past as well because of Jennifer Lawrence. Now when that movie came out Jennifer Lawrence was famous and Oscar nominated but not quite as famous as she is right now. Let's go back, though. Basically, the key figures here are Patrick Stewart as Professor X, Hugh Jackman as Logan Wolverine. And Jackman famously almost

wasn't Wolverine. There's that great story about how DeGray Scott hurt himself making Mission Impossible 2 and had to cede the floor shout out to the motorcycle fight yes you know my favorite casting what if of the whole X-Men franchise no Glenn Danzig

turned down the role of Wolverine apparently that's true I don't know if Danzig has gone on the record about that shout out to Rothman apparently that's true

yeah it's a great ask and you mentioned McKellen we mentioned Halle Berry those four people now Hugh Jackman was relatively unknown at this point but those four people. Now Hugh Jackman was relatively unknown at this point, but those four people, serious, heavyweight, real actors.

And then Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Bruce Davison as Senator Robert Kelly, who has an amazingly weird arc in these stories. I think it's a little bit forgotten when he turns into like a water mutant. Yeah, and like he's like at the statue. Yeah, of course. You remember that?

Rebecca Romijn we mentioned. And then there is this, you know, series of younger figures. There's Anna Paquin as Rogue. There's Sean Ashmore as Iceman. There's Aaron Stanford as Pyro. And it feels like what they've done is basically created three generations of X-Men

to support these movies. And they'll make Logan the linchpin of all of those movies. And I don't know, what stuck out to you about that collection of people? Because I remember feeling both shocked by the quality of actor and confused by like the Sean Ashmore's of the world. Sure. I thought that was a really good representation of the clash of sensibilities possibly between marketing departments, you know, PR departments, writers, directors, producers, studio executives. I think that Stuart McKellen, those guys make a lot of sense. They're an extension of the Alan

Rickman diehard philosophy, which is, this is what it is. But if we put really good actors in it, it could be something very special. It's a great call. So I'm very familiar with, let's get an Oscar winning British man to be in this movie, and it'll just be 8% better by the fact that he's reading these words. And they hit that casting out of the park, but they immediately put themselves in a corner in terms of the age. Now, Charles Xavier, obviously not the most mobile person in the world. You're not going to get a lot of the comics, is like the most powerful villain and also just this incredibly dynamic, visceral, physical actor in the comic books.

And McKellen does really well in those first few movies, but by Days of Future Past, they are not standing a lot, either of those actors. Yeah, they're basically cordoned off in like a tunnel temple. A tomb with Ellen Page. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're basically cordoned off in like a tunnel temple. A tomb with Ellen Page. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the reset that you talked about with Vaughn's first class

is where the timelines get more confusing, but I think in many ways the acting gets, I don't know about better per se, but they re-energize the franchise. The Last Stand happens, we're at Ratner's movie. It's not successful. I actually thought it was not as bad as I had remembered when I rewatched it.

What they've basically done is they've fused the gifted storyline. The Joss Whedon one, yeah. Yes, with the Dark Phoenix saga. And I don't think that Famke Jansen can really carry the weight of that series. And I think that there's a lot of confusing tension between, like, who was the villain in this story and why. But they close the chapter with that series and then they bring in James McAvoy and they bring in Michael Fassbender.

Eric, you said yourself, we're the better men. This is the time to prove it. There are thousands of men on those ships that are just following orders. I've been at the mercy of men just following orders. As Professor Xavier and Magneto. And then they also bring in Rose Byrne. And they bring in Jennifer Lawrence.

January Jones. Jan Jones is killing it in first class. Kevin Bacon as the villain. Nicholas Holt. Oliver Platt getting some run. Oh, Zoe Kravitz comes in as Angel. There's this incredible collection of young performers. They got it right.

And it works. Yeah. But then in a weird way, they have written themselves into a corner because they know that since that worked, they have to keep going back

to these characters. And so, it's not bad for the X-Men movies. It's actually quite good. But as we sort of transition a conversation into Dark Phoenix,

it's incredible to me how perfunctorily Michael Fassbender is performing in these movies by the end of them because he's honestly, Fassbender is performing in these movies by the end of them because he's honestly just candidly just like better than these movies like Michael Fassbender is I think McAvoy Lawrence and Fassbender regardless of what you think of the movies they make are way better than the material they are given and it's sad because what you have

in the first two at least and arguably the first three but especially the first two x-men movies is great actors being given pretty good material and elevating it and this you have great actors getting frankly after days of future past material that is far beneath them and acting like it yes there's a lot of gun to your head acting going on in apocalypse and dark phoenix yes and fast vendors has to do a lot in apocalypse andocalypse. And unfortunately, it's just not really worthy of his talent. And so there is, again, like a kind of dissonance in the storytelling where you're like, this is Michael Fassbender. And McAvoy, too, who has proven himself, I think, somewhat surprisingly to be kind of

like a genre pulpy actor with all the M. Night Shyamalan stuff that he's done. And he seems to have an affinity for that sort of work. But wanted, atomic blonde,'s he's up for whatever he's comfortable in that space and Jennifer Lawrence too I mean you know I was chatting with Bill yesterday

and he was he said we really need to do how we fix it for Jennifer Lawrence's career and I think in some ways it's funny the franchises that you choose because nobody was really

worried about Jennifer Lawrence's career and the movies she picks when she was making The Hunger Games that went over swimmingly whether you like those movies or not

everybody's like oh that was successful they did that well in these movies when she's making The Hunger Games. That went over swimmingly. Whether you like those movies or not, everybody's like, oh, that was successful. They did that well. In these movies, when she's in her fifth X-Men movie, and she, again, very similarly feels like gun to her head performing, you're like, what? How did we get here, I guess, is ultimately the thing.

And so let's use that as a way to talk about Dark Phoenix. Are you sure about that? Because we're taking bigger and bigger risks. And for what? Please, tell me it's not your ego. Being on the cover of magazines, getting a medal from the president. You like it, don't you?

So Dark Phoenix is ostensibly the last movie in this series, although next year, Josh Boone's The New Mutants will be released. Sure. What role that has in this mythology. You want to make a bet on that? Yeah, it's hard to say. It's already been moved three times, although notably so is the Dark Phoenix.

This movie has moved. Can we just do really quickly, because I think it's worth, in case listeners don't understand, Fox merger stuff, because I think that kind of plays into what's happening here a lot. Yeah, so earlier this year,

for $71 billion, Fox Filmed Entertainment and all of its subsidiaries, with the exception of a handful of networks, were sold to Disney. Disney, of course, owns the MCU. It is the juggernaut of superhero storytelling in 2019. Also, these are both technically Marvel properties. It's also notable that at a time, Marvel, Avi Arad, even Kevin Feige, to some extent, was involved at various stages of these X-Men movies, just not in the same way that they have been in with the MCU and even with the way that the most recent Spider-Man movies have happened.

But since they're all coming together, there's been a lot of armchair jockeying about how will the X-Men eventually fit into this story. So this new movie feels like a bit of a fait accompli. The ceiling is fairly low. And the writer-director, Simon Kinberg, who has produced and written on several of these films. Every one, basically. Aside from Singer is probably, and Shuler Donner is one of the chief creative architects

of the series franchise. He wrote and directed Apocalypse, and he has been very forward being like, this is the end of this cycle of movies. And whatever happens, happens. And you and I have speculated before about how we think the X-Men could figure into the MCU in the years to come.

But instead of taking the opportunity to send this franchise out with a bang and really do it right and be like, you know what, we don't have to worry about the next movie. We don't have to worry about whether or not Fassbender's coming back. They kind of squandered the opportunity. And I think you can see a lot of the problems

that have haunted this franchise in Dark Phoenix I completely agree, it's strange because you mentioned before that these movies are not terribly funny, I would say at the very least one they had Logan Hey, it's me prove it, you're a dick okay

who is always cracking wise and two, there's at least some verve you know in first class there's some energy. First class in Days of Future Past, like junkie Charles Xavier in Days of Future Past, who's shooting like a serum to keep his spine together and is really bantering with Logan. Like McAvoy and Jackman are great together

in Days of Future Past with Nicholas Holt riding shotgun. There's some good chemistry between a couple of the different pairings. I honestly think that like those movies were really hamstrung by like, there's just, they just don't know what to do with mystique and with Lawrence. Yes. I agree with that in,

in dark Phoenix. This is perhaps the most humorless comic book movie I've ever seen. And I, and that is in a world in which Zack Snyder has made comic book movies. Oh, for sure. And I actually wanted to talk about that a little bit with you because... It makes Batman versus Superman look like always be my maybe. Seriously.

It's just like, whatever the spectrum of people having fun doing something is, Randall Park and Ali Wong being like, we fucking did it. We made a rom-com together. And these guys being like, I'm wearing Gap clothes from 1996 and trying to move things with my mind against a green screen. It's wild.

It's clearly a purposeful choice. I just don't totally understand the choice. I think what Kinberg, who has never directed a film before this, this is his directorial debut, even though he has been a producer on lots of kind of schlocky, mediocre stuff, but also movies like The Martian.

You know, he's a very experienced producer and writer. And interestingly, self-identifies as part of a generation with Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Benioff, Drew Goddard, like a bunch of guys who are, I think are very thoughtful about genre material I think these guys

in a lot of ways are brilliant you know I don't I don't sit here to run down their films I you talked about some of the studio complications it's probably really hard

to get a movie like this made in the way that you want to get it made and dealing with a fanboy culture that is hectoring you while also dealing with suits who don't really understand what you're trying to do

if you have genuine admiration for the source material is complicated. No, I think Black Panther and Dark Knight screwed us up. Because we're like, see? You could just do that. What's wrong with you? It's a great point. Kinberg in particular, though, as I said, hasn't directed a movie.

He clearly is going for this sort of mournful, baleful, sort of angry, complicated, almost like a movie that seems interested in mental health and disassociative personalities. And all of these, if you look deeply into the movie, you can find some of these things that are also thematic to the Dark Phoenix saga. And all that is fine. Like, I appreciate him trying to tell a story like that. It just doesn't have anything to do with other X-Men stories. And in a way that is different from the MCU, where they can say, let's slide the Ryan Coogler Pez dispenser into this vast galaxy. And we'll get maybe not the perfect Ryan Coogler movie, but we'll get so much of his sensibility, so much of his view of the world, so many of his ideas about the way that his story fits into their story.

And his swagger. Yes. The X-Men franchise can't hold that. No. It just can't sustain a story like that. So in Dark Phoenix, I think the second act is the movie that Kinberg wanted to make. It's actually visually distinctive from the first and third acts, which is never a good sign for a movie. It's got a lot of handheld, a lot of very close close-ups of people in anguish,

of Magneto in some sort of state of like disarray or, uh, Sophie Turner or Jean gray, uh, you know, coming apart or McAvoy coming apart. It's very, very intense and, uh,

deliberate. It's obviously like, that was the visual style that I think he was pitched. He pitched it as, and then there is the first act that they have seemingly, I wouldn't say reshot, but there's a lot of stuff in the first act that makes it feel very like we shot this on a lot somewhere. And then the third act, which is almost entirely pretty bad special effects.

On a train. Yeah. I completely agree with what you're saying. The problem is, is that you can't make an X-Men movie that looks like Ingmar Bergman's persona. Like you just, it's just not... This is literally an intergalactic tale. And so that first act takes place in space and on a mission. And I would say that some of that stuff works.

It is really not faithful at all to the way that the original story is told. In fact, it inverts a lot of the storytelling choices from the Claremont Byrne run of the story. There's characters that get amalgamated into one, which is essentially the Chastain characters, a bunch of different characters in one. Yes, and let's talk about that.

Theoretically, the bad guy in this movie, the big bad, is Jessica Chastain, who I think is playing some sort of Dabari leader, which is an alien race that comes to this world. But isn't it like the Shire in the comics? It's because phoenix goes out and destroys their world with her unstoppable powers exactly and on the one hand much like the forgive me if i've mispronounced uh intergalactic x-men well we talked about this with the avengers and the chitauri and there's always an alien race that is aggrieved or is coming to take over our world and it's always sort of it's either

over explained or under explained i would say in world and it's always sort of it's either over explained or under explained i would say in this movie it's under explained and kind of confounding there's a kind of invasion of the body snatchers segment that introduces all of these figures chastain is doing really one of the weirdest things i've ever seen this was my favorite actress for years and years and she's in a little bit of a i don't i i'm not sure what's moving her at this stage of her career can i say though she's the only one throwing her fastball in this movie you think so see i didn't i thought she was totally like new like probably like first day on set like energy permeated what is admittedly an absolute

dog baby of a character like yeah she's going for it now it's not that great and she has to like walk across a bunch of dead bodies and high heels and an overcoat and all that stuff. But considering the looks on the faces of Fassbender and Lawrence throughout much of this movie, she is practically Laurence Olivier doing Hamlet. I'm going to respectfully disagree

with you. I think she has made a choice. I was not like, give Chastain her spin-off now. The Oscar race starts here. You and I should start, let's start a bunch of really bad petitions. Okay. Petition to recast Chastain with who? With Mark Ruffalo?

Yeah. No, to me, it struck me as Tilda Swinton in a remake of Powder. Okay. You know, like that's just, I don't understand the visual choices that she made. Chastain's making a lot of weird choices these days, for sure. I don't, you know, I don't begrudge her the desire to get money

to make an X-Men movie. That's also the story about a lot of these actors that we're saying like, oh, they're so stuck in these movies. They're not stuck. Michael Fassbender has a beautiful home in the hills somewhere because of these movies. These, we're not,

these guys were not in jail. No. All of the main actors, according to Kinberg, their contracts were up after Apocalypse. They agreed to come back. And they asked Kinberg to direct this movie and they would come back. And they all came back and talked about their characters with him

and talked about what they wanted to do. Fassbender was like, I really want to do Genosha, where there's this island that Magneto has for mutants who have been outcast from mutant society, basically. And they wanted to do this movie. And you can pretty much see the day when they realized what they were making, because they do not hide it in this movie. It's a confounding entertainment. I think it's rare to see at this stage, too, a comic book movie get so critically savaged, but the reviews hit last night and I did not read a single positive review. I think it's in the 20s. Which is just, and you know, what that means is I guess worth unpacking. We talk about it

routinely on this show and even on the rewatchables, the notion of Rotten Tomatoes scores and people caping for movies in an effort to keep scores high. There was all this conversation this week about Chernobyl and the IMDb ratings. Did you follow this at all? I didn't. About how Chernobyl is the highest rated series in the history of IMDb. IMDb ratings are more meaningless than Rotten Tomatoes. They're not even based on any critical faculty whatsoever.

They're just people pressing buttons. Anyhow, we're in this continued state of distortion and confusion around what it means for a movie to be when are you gonna release the Snyder Cut though what's your problem well I've got a lot of thoughts on the Snyder Cut we'll be talking about the Snyder Cut later on this show probably in June would be my guess okay uh so we'll put a pin in that nevertheless this movie has been savaged yeah and on the one hand I can see why it's been savaged because it's just not fun to watch. Halfway through it, I was like, oh my God, they biffed this so hard.

I can't believe how much, because in part, the source material is so good. There is this plethora of talented people involved. By all accounts, Kinberg seems pretty smart. It's hard to believe that he doesn't know what he's doing. I would love to know what the sort of backroom dealings are, the studio executive notes are on this movie. Yeah. Because the decision to reshoot, and they did do reshoots last year, and the decision to move the release date twice indicate that it has changed a lot. That first act certainly feels new. And that third act is just confusing, and here's why. Yeah, go ahead. As I said, this is an intergalactic story. So to make the crushing conclusion take place on a train is one of the dumbest things

I've ever seen. It doesn't, it literally doesn't make sense. We also just saw, we've seen so many train sequences in movies like this in recent years too. It's utterly redundant to what we do. So why a movie like this won't take place in space or a new planet? And we've seen the way that space has become such a significant part of the Marvel story. I just was completely confounded like an hour and 20 minutes into it. Yeah. Also, shout out to Battle of Winterfell. It takes place almost all at night.

This train sequence is indecipherable. That's a money thing right there. Well, here's another money thing. So much easier to make CGI. You're asking why this movie is getting savage. I don't think it's going to be particularly enjoyed by fans either. And I'll tell you why. I think that these guys, fans know what they want now. And it's not necessarily,

I'm not talking about release the Snyder Cut. What I'm talking about is you can't do a protest scene where there are 12 protesters. You can't do scale and sweep and not spend the money. You know, I think that over the course of the last 10 years and over the, while X-Men movies were still making, hey, let's just have this fight in a, in a, in a, on a soundstage and, and you won't know who these characters are and they'll just kind of karate kick each other for a little bit and then it'll be over. It's like, no man, like these movies now shut down highways and do like, they do a winter soldier or Marvel, like Captain America Civil War fights

like on highways while cars are driving around. And then when they do big sequences, like when Christopher Nolan does the police funeral in Dark Knight, he shuts down Chicago to do it. And you can either spend the money to do that and make it look amazing and make people believe they're in this world, or you can have a bunch of people in rubber suits

slapping at each other and that's what you're going to get. Do you can have a bunch of people in rubber suits slapping at each other, and that's what you're going to get. Do you think it's a question of money, failure of imagination? I think it's where they spend the money. I don't know whether or not Fox was to some extent like, the actors are paid for, the sets are built, this is the budget.

We're not going to get a return on this investment 10 years from now when the real X-Men movies start paying off. But I also think it's think if you watch First Class with no disrespect to the other people who have made these movies, it's just a visually richer, more interesting movie. And honestly, Jane Goldman's script is just a more charming, interesting, humorous, thoughtful script than a lot of the other scripts that happen in these X-Men movies. So if we know how to watch them and fans know what they want, and in some respects we're fans and the more I do this, I feel like the guy who grew

up a Celtics fan but doesn't have a rooting interest anymore, or I'm like, I see this much more as a playing field thing and much less as I loved this thing, which is complicated about comic book movies in particular, because if you don't love them, it's hard to talk about them without sounding like a crank. But I don't know how they'll do this. I know what story I think the MCU is going to tell next. But how long do you have to wait to recast Magneto? How long do you have to wait for Jackman to be dead and gone? Or do they come back?

Do they come in? I think that they'll be in within the next five years. I think within the next five years, you'll have at least a appearance from one of them, whether it's Professor X or Wolverine, and they will figure it out. Because I think DC is sort of proving that there is just an insatiable market for these movies

and that people are not as invested in the actor playing the character as they are in the character. And so they're ready to see Robert Pattinson as Batman. They're ready for Suicide Squad to be different than the Suicide Squad from the movie three years ago. Sidebar, what do you think about Pattinson and Batman? Great. You're into it? I can't wait to that. Yeah. Because I think that if they let Matt Reeves make the movie he wants to make, it'll be a really cool movie. See, this is a challenge though,

because this is what Simon Kinberg wanted to do, allegedly. And this is what the actors wanted to do. They wanted to make the movie they wanted to make. But then when the stakes get high and the studio looks at the dailies and they realize that somebody is making a Swedish impressionistic version of an intergalactic story, then what do you do? Then you got to get a train sequence. I guess my point is,

my counter to that would be if Matt Reeves can make it on not a budget, but if he can say like, look, they let Mangold make Logan. It made this. You let Christopher Nolan do Batman Begins before he becomes Christopher Nolan,

Christopher Nolan. He does this. I've made Planet of the Apes. I know how to work within franchise and IP and set up next movies and do this. He basically made Apocalypse Now with

all apes. I like those movies a lot. Matt Reeves is really good, so I really hope that they let him make the movie he wants to make. It seems weird if they didn't because it's just, you guys didn't have to make a Batman movie, or you could have let Affleck make his. It's true. And I think your broader point is 100% correct, which is we're at a phase now where it doesn't have to be in a phase. We don't need these movies to exist serialized. DC has been very smart about saying Shazam's over here.

Birds of Prey's over here. Suicide Squad 2 but isn't 2 is over here. Marvel and Fox and Disney together have not yet sought that strategy. And I wonder if we'll ever get another Logan. Let's just talk about Logan a little bit, which I think is definitely among my favorite movies of 2017. It has grown in estimation over time. I got much more jazzed about it re-watching the Ford versus Ferrari trailer, thinking about what Mangold does well. And that movie, to their credit,

when you look at what Hugh Jackman and Mangold and a series of other people who worked on it said, Scott Frank, what they said when they were making it was like, this is kind of in the chronology, but it's actually just our own story. Like, this is what we wanted to do with it and we had a relative amount of independence and it really worked and it got the best reviews of their careers all of them frankly and was almost an oscar contender even though i think it should have been but but there is an amazing amount of stupid comic book stuff in it that's still that is easy to just ignore or not think about in the same way there is like a it's grounded I guess for lack of a better word

and I'm curious to see because I think that that is a useful part of the X-Men storytelling if the MCU will ever let something like that

No I mean I think Marvel is different I think Marvel is the other side of the coin that we're talking about with DC where they can release

Captain Marvel and it's like it turns out it doesn't matter if you guys think that this movie is like it's like, it turns out it doesn't matter if you guys think that this movie is like, it's actually a Claire Denis movie. It doesn't matter. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's going to make $800 million because you have to see it before you see Avengers. But here's the thing right now we're in year 11 of the MCU. So year 11 of the X-Men series was what? Was it first class?

Mm-hmm. So that was a revival moment and it felt like the future was in front of them. When we get to year 19 of the MCU, will we be ready to dispense with this?

Not if it's Fantastic Four and X-Men. Can I share an opinion? Mm-hmm. Fantastic Four sucks. Uh, I don't really have a deep affinity for them,

but if they bring in 8 to 12 new characters and they turn this over, salute. That would be amazing. I have an interesting what if for you. I don't know if you want

to talk about this right now, but we were talking about Lawrence. Was there a huge missed opportunity to not have Jennifer Lawrence play Jean Grey? A hundred percent.

Because, I mean, with no disrespect to the summer of Sophie and I think she's just a phenomenal celebrity Sophie Turner she gets absolutely

blown off the screen in this movie by nothing it's not like anyone else is trying very hard but she just doesn't have the chops for this in some ways

I guess my appreciation for Chastain is because if you see somebody in a really bad movie and they still are committed, or they do a decent job in bad lighting and boring framing and stupid everything else, and they're still like, oh yeah, you're actually really committed to doing this part and you're not hamming it up too much. Sophie Turner is like, what?

She just really has no idea what's happening the entire movie. And I honestly thought she, it seemed like she was really struggling with the accent and was like really trying hard not to break the accent. And that limited her range of emotions. Cause I thought she was quite good in the last few seasons of Game of Thrones. I mean, I thought she was great in Game of Thrones in general. So I was watching Jennifer Lawrence and I was watching her having to go through all this like emotional stuff of like who are you choosing in days of future past and are you going to be on magneto's team or xavier's team and in this movie she's like i don't know i mean

she's just there to die i get like i don't know if we spoil you it's fine yeah she's just there to be like i'm the i'm the thing that happens in the 25th minute that makes this the stakes are high every review has pointed out that she does not last more than 30 minutes in this movie. Which is in the trailer, practically, yeah. But I was watching it, and I was like, she probably wouldn't have wanted to do another multi-movie franchise after Hunger Games.

But if they had made her Jean Grey, and they had done the Dark Phoenix story the way it should be told, which is probably more than one movie, it would have been kind of an interesting, it's just an interesting hypothetical. So in Golanopoulos' piece, Claremont kind of gets the last word on this.

And he says that he always wanted to be the author of the Dark Phoenix movie. And the way that he would do it is it would be a two-part movie, as you suggest. And it would essentially end, Age of Apocalypse would end and they would segue directly into the Dark Phoenix saga. And in order to make that work, you need a really powerful actress.

Now, I am perhaps not as big a fan of Jennifer Lawrence's chops. I think Jennifer Lawrence is an excellent actress when she is being herself. I think the Silver Linings Playbook version, yes. That has always made a lot of sense to me as a, that actually is a legible 70s style movie star persona. She's like Burt Reynolds. Yeah, yeah. She's just Jennifer Lawrence doing stuff.

She's just like Denzel. But when she's like Red Sparrowing it. It's just not credible to me. And I have a hard time watching her in those movies. And likewise, Jean Grey is not the most, is not the deepest character, you know? And the movie takes great pains to show what Jean has endured, the death of her parents, how Charles saved her.

Some of that is like retconning to make the movies work for them. And we also saw a version of this same story told in The Last Stand. So that's a little bit confusing if you don't remember how everything played out. But it necessitates a real depth. This is only the second time we've seen Sophie Turner in one of these movies. And even in the last film that she was in, in Apocalypse, she's just not in it that much. So we don't have much of a relationship with her as this character. Famke Janssen, I think is a fine actress. She's fantastic in Rounders.

There's just a product of the fact that Famke Janssen is just older than Sophie Turner in those movies and carries with her a different set of experiences in her acting. I mean, like Sophie Turner is in her early 20s and I think it would work in terms of, like, here's a young woman who doesn't quite understand what's happening to her. So that makes sense.

But there's huge parts of what makes the Dark Phoenix story interesting is all these different people trying to manipulate her and they kind of try to make that

just chastain. But if you go back, I really recommend it. Anybody who hasn't read these comics, it's really, really, really a great story. And the relationship between her back if i really recommend it anybody who hasn't read these comics it's it's really really really a great story and the um the relationship between her and cyclops and um shout out to ty sheridan

who's now spent five years wearing a mask in movies poor guy what do his eyes even look like what color are his eyes ready player one and two x-men movies that guy's been wearing a visor he's gotta get a better agent it's a a really tough beat. You know, the truth is the person who should be playing Dark Phoenix is Jessica Chastain. She already has the hair. She already has the disposition. She's not a funny actress, but she can communicate depth of feeling

with a look. And it's just bizarre that she's on screen and not Dark Phoenix. You just want Jean Grey to turn to Professor X and be like, You don't know anything about Pakistan! I do. not dark Phoenix. You just want Jean gray to turn to professor X and be like, you don't know anything about Pakistan. I do zero dark Phoenix. I, I just,

I think that why are we, why are we working for Fox? What's up with that? Just, just call us. Just, just call the doctors, release the big picture cut.

Uh, I don't know what, I don't, I, I, I still can't really wrap my head around how they got this so wrong it's interesting to look back on as an artifact in which things like this rarely do go wrong

I think we were struck near the end of this movie we both kind of looked at each other and were like man, this sucks and I rarely feel that way at franchise films now it's because we don't have a personal attachment it's like you guys can do whatever you want with Thor I hope it works out

that's a great point and is this kind of the last vestige of that yeah because I do think that whenever they pop up in the MCU it's not it's going to be way more Guardians of the Galaxy than it is this and for as problematic as these movies are and for as many of them which basically probably weren't ready to be released that did come out um there was a real like kind of uh dramatic danger to them that I don't think exists in the Marvel movies. And there was a real angst to them and sincere anxiety and darkness to them that Marvel has to kind of staple on to what are essentially pretty breezy action movies. Let me make one last point to your point.

We didn't say this at all, but one, I think the X-Men series in general is created to cite people who feel different and feel outside of the world. And that's a big part of the creation myth around the characters. And then the singer characters, which is totally complicated by his personal life and his real life, but especially X2 was seen as this sort of bastion

of gay identity coming out of the closet. All of these big ideas in these movies that honestly felt radical so when did you first know you were a mutant but you cut that out you have to understand we thought bobby was going to a school for the gifted bobby is the gifted. We know that. We just didn't realize he was... We still love you, Bobby. It's just this mutant problem is a little...

What mutant problem? And somewhere along the way, these movies stopped being thematic. And they just started being comic books. And as much as I think Days of Future Past is effective, I don't know if that movie is really about anything. And Dark Phoenix is making an effort to be about something. It's striving towards that. It's about like they make explicit references to men controlling women in this movie.

Exactly. And that is, I think it's a noble gesture, but they have distorted the shape and the meaning of the movie so much over the last 20 years that, as I said earlier, it just can't carry it. There's been a lot of conversation about what a comic book movie should do in terms of representation, in terms of what it means to young people to see these people on screen, and all of those things. I think the X-Men movies are a little bit lost to time in that respect. Very quickly, what do you think the role of a movie like this is in terms of reflecting genuine societal concern? I mean, it's fascinating to go back and read those comics, a lot of which were written in the 90s and they feel very 90s, but there is a lot of diversity in them and a lot of diversity in the backgrounds of the characters.

I mean, everything from like, you know, Bishop being this time traveling bodyguard to Gambit's kind of Creole background. And you've got a lot of like transformation going on in these characters. A lot of them are trying to do, doing incredible things to their bodies to hold back what they actually are. You know, like they're trying to control,

not their powers, but this thing that's inside of them. And it's really pretty nakedly about like how fluid identity is in a lot of ways. And X-Men wasn't considered quote unquote woke you know what i mean the comic books it was just like it was certainly diverse but it was like these are different walks of life literally these are different people having different experiences so i think that that's the legacy of these stories not necessarily

i would agree with you the the some of these movies do range into that territory. It's very hard to imagine them doing all that and also doing the MCU serialized grunt work. I think that they'll play lip service to certain things. And you know what?

Honestly, does it make a difference if we have a black Wolverine? Does anybody really care about that anymore? It's a legitimate question. You could recast a lot of these parts for plenty of different roles. They have backgrounds, but I don't know how X-Men fits into that.

That's a good question. We're going to find out because it was really the load-bearing metaphor machine for much of the 80s and 90s, and the films started to do a lot of that work, and they're not doing that work anymore chris any final thoughts on dark phoenix release the kinberg cut i think we were getting the kinberg cut which is sort of the tragedy of dark phoenix chris thanks for doing this

you Thank you.