Good news, nerds: Recent reports point to the MCU finally moving forward with its X-Men adaptation. Can these uncanny heroes save the sputtering franchise from what’s felt like four years of post-Endgame senioritis? Maybe – but only if Feige and company avoid the following comic book stories like they’re Rogue’s exposed forearm in a crowded elevator.
The Dark Phoenix saga
It’s so tantalizing, isn’t it, Hollywood? The beloved, undeniably cinematic story of a once-underpowered young woman granted abilities beyond the scope of man’s ability to comprehend. It’s not just iconic, it’s ubiquitous. It defined generations of X-Men stories. For years, it was the solid gold standard – that elusive, multi-part epic traversing scales both galactic and deeply personal.
And after two big screen adaptations with a combined estimated budget roughly equal to the GDP of Micronesia, Fox went 0 for 2 on Phoenix Saga adaptations. It may be that the idea is just too big for one movie, incorporating alien high courts and galactic battle arenas and supervillain fetish clubs and psychic Revolutionary War-era gaslighting and so on. But the promise of audience recognition is too delicious for studios to pass up, and the story seems to keep falling prey to the same gnawing “maybe if we just changed one tiny thing” compromising attitude that slowly transformed John Constantine into a dark-haired American who quit smoking cigarettes.
In short: Tackling Byrne and Claremont’s Phoenix comics would mean either a three-movie lead-up full of obnoxious, winking hints at what’s coming down the pipe, or another crowded, pared-down, barely-recognizable version of events with the stink of studio heads saying “what if we just toned down the genocide?” all over it. Now and forever, we’re not interested.
New X-Men
It’s not easy to admit. It’s not a secret that Grant Morrison’s New X-Men did as much to save the series as the beginning of the Fox movie franchise from around the same time. It is a remarkable reimagining of the franchise grounded in the disturbing and almost infinitely re-readable. It gave us characters like Quentin Quire and Beak and the Xavier Institute’s Remedial Class.
It’s also — and this word gets thrown around a lot by comic nerds — unfilmable. It hinges on the horrible, beautiful, wrinkled, and pocked artwork of Frank Quitely, hammering home the fact that we are, all of us, body horror monstrosities, not just those of us born with paraffin wax for skin. It features a fight to the death between fetuses and a man with a nervous system that’s outside of his body. Beyond the weirdness, it’s built on a foundation of stories that don’t translate without decades of setup – an island of wild, naturally evolving Sentinels, and a boy who rebels against his school by invoking a fictional editorial from a comic from the ‘60s. The whole thing is inside baseball, if the baseball had a double chin and had the power to puke acid.
Battle of the Atom
There’s a lot to say about Battle of the Atom, and a lot of reasons why it shouldn’t be the basis for a new X-Men movie. In the end, though, it all boils down to one sentence: It was bad.
And it’s a drag. Battle of the Atom came straight from the mid-MCU era when comics seemed specifically designed to inspire new movies. It was sandwiched between some of the better X-Men stories in recent memory, theoretically combining four middling-to-awesome titles into one blockbuster event. Brian Michael Bendis’ love letter to 50 years of the franchise in All-New X-Men brought a confused group of year-one Xavier School students to meet their present selves. BotA pitted them — alongside Cyclops’ splinter group from Bendis’ other title, Uncanny X-Men — against horrible future versions of themselves. It should have been all-killer stuff. It wound up muddled, largely consequence-free, and way too mired in its own continuity to make for a good time at the theater.
Ultimate X-Men
If you don’t know Ultimate X-Men, don’t look it up. Additionally, don’t look up what Wolverine caught Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver doing in the privacy of their own rainforest.
Readers’ mileage varied wildly when it came to Marvel’s Ultimate universe. It gave us some of the best Spider-Man stories in years, even before introducing Miles Morales. It made the Fantastic Four weird and horny and eventually turned one of them into contemporary Marvel’s only really great villain. Ultimate X-Men, meanwhile, just kind of stunk up the place and gave Wolverine an early-’00s chin beard a la a ska band front man by way of Shaggy from Scooby Doo.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
