Fun fact about “X-Men: Apocalypse”: while reviews weren’t kind, and it’s far from the pinnacle of the mutant movies, it’s actually the second highest grossing X-Men flick. Not counting “Deadpool,” “Logan,” or “The Wolverine,” it sits second behind all time leader, “X-Men: Days Of Future Past.” Regardless, it’s not going to go down as one of the best entries in the series and film’s producer and co-writer Simon Kinberg admits as much.
“I think we took our eye off what has always been the bedrock of the franchise which is these characters,” he told EW. “It became about global destruction and visual effects over emotion and character.”
Few would disagree with that assessment, and the film’s co-producer Hutch Parker elaborates where things might’ve gone wrong for the superhero movie.
“It’s always dangerous if your script is evolving while you’re shooting. Certainly, in hindsight, we all feel like the genre has been evolving aesthetically and tonally and that the film didn’t,” he explained. “There’s a lot that I think is very good in the film but, as a whole, it was struggling to find ways to coalesce, narratively emotionally and in terms of plot. Aesthetically, it felt sort of dated relative to an evolution you were seeing play out everywhere else. We learned a lot from that.”
These are interesting comments, and one wonders how Bryan Singer might feel hearing all this. Granted, he has bigger worries at the moment, but with Jennifer Lawrence suggesting recently that Singer’s sets weren’t always the most orderly of places, it seems there’s more to the story.
Kinberg will get a chance to set things right when “X-Men: Dark Phoenix” opens on November 2, 2018.