By all accounts, X3 should mark the end of the X-Men movie franchise. We've had our little war, the bad guys have been defeated, and a degree of peace has been established between mutants and the rest of humanity. And although there have been terrible losses, we have our happily-ever-after ending.
Don't count on it.
An old friend of mine was fond of saying, "If it works, you have to beat it into the ground. That's how they think in Hollywood." So even though X3 provides a pretty good stopping point for the series, the revenues tell a different story.
The largest Memorial Day opening ever? You can't ignore numbers like that. X4 is an inevitability. Write it down.
Now, if anything even remotely resembling the first three X-Movies is going to work, I figure that most or all of the following have to happen:
1. Charles isn't really dead.
2. Magneto hasn't really lost his powers.
3. Jean isn't really dead.
4. Scott isn't really dead.
None of which is really a problem to someone sufficiently creative(or someone with sufficient financial motivation). Observe:
1. Charles isn't really dead.
If you stuck around to watch all the credits, you already know how this works. Jean may have atomized the good professor's body, but his mind lives on in incorporeal form, looking for an uninhabited body. Conveniently enough, there happens to be just such a body in Moira McTaggert's lab in Scotland.† Problem solved.
2. Magneto hasn't really lost his powers.
This one's already been taken care of, too. At the end of the movie, Eric moves a metal chess piece in the park. Okay, so it's not the Golden Gate Bridge, but even though the 'cure' was supposed to suppress all mutant abilities permanently, it appears that Magneto was so powerful that even the four doses of the 'cure' that the Beast hit him with (or was it five?) didn't quite destroy his powers. With time and practice—and Experience Points—Maggie will be back to his usual charming self before you know it. Check.
3. Jean isn't really dead.
Okay, she really is dead ... but it wasn't really Jean. It was actually ... wait, wait, don't tell me ... a phenomenally powerful cosmic entity who saw Jean trying to save the X-Men, was moved by her courage and compassion, and saved her life by placing her in healing stasis at the bottom of Alkali Lake while it took on Jean's physical form, fought in her place alongside the X-Men, and ultimately died heroically and/or tragically.‡ Bingo.
4. Scott isn't really dead.
This is the easiest one to fix, because Scott's really not dead. How do we know this? Because we never saw his body. For the newbies, the First Rule of Comic Books is: If you don't see a body, he's not dead! He may be in Acapulco. He may be a deranged amnesiac. He may have even lost his powers. But he's not dead. Count on it. The fact is that the only evidence we have that Scott might be dead is Jean's own confession—and given her state of mind at the time, she's not exactly what I'd call a reliable eyewitness. Quad erat demonstrandum.
So, to those of us who are longtime fans of the superhero genre, none of this is much of a stretch. It's all pretty standard stuff, really. But to the general public, it might be a bit much to swallow, and the movie could flop. X4 might only make $100 million on opening weekend. Tragic.
Hey, if (when) the powers-that-be do eventually decide to make X4 (and beyond...?), here's something really radical they could try: an original story! After all the different storylines that've been botched in the past two movies, how about something that doesn't try to borrow from every single major story arc from the last twenty years? These characters are interesting enough to carry a movie on their own merits, and a good scriptwriter could do amazing things with them. Write a script that tells a meaningful story about the characters, and you'll have a good—and ultimtely successful—movie.§
'Nuff said, bub.
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†The problem here is finding someone to play the Professor. Even with his psyche intact, he'll look completely different. So we'll probably have to have Patrick Stewart's voice dubbed over someone else's actions, kind of like James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. But who to play Xavier's new body...? Maybe Jonathan Frakes is available.
‡In other words, the 'original' Jean Grey/Phoenix Force storyline—one of the very stupidest rewrites in the history of a genre rife with stupid rewrites. (In my humble opinion.)
§ Maybe they could get someone like Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczynski to write the script for X4. Better yet, send Derek, me, and the OGC a few hundred thousand dollars, and we'll write it.
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