If Disney buys Fox...

… and to be clear, as I write this its only being reported by one source so pinch of salt but if they do buy Fox (or “the bulk of Fox's media assets” as the Newsarama article put it) then I look forward to what Marvel Studios does with the Fantastic Four.

The X-Men, not so much.

Put the pitchforks down and let me explain. Now, I'm not quite on board with the idea a lot of people seem to have that the X-franchise should have ended with Logan. It was a great movie (only the second or third the series has produced, shockingly) and I loved it but I also really want to see what the franchise can do now that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine is off the table. There are so many characters, teams, storylines and ideas floating around in that property that have gone unexploited for so long. Hell, I'm even looking forward to that odd superhero/horror hybrid they're putting out under the New Mutants name.

I just don't think there's much mileage to putting the X-Men in the MCU. They've got the Inhumans for better or worse to be their standard issue excuse for why this person who doesn't rate an involved origin has powers. They've got the Avengers to act as their big tentpole team. I'm not sure what the X-Men or the mutant concept offers at this point.

So maybe it might benefit Disney to keep the X-Men as a seperate franchise. There's an audience pop to be had in adding Wolverine to the Avengers but I think that's about it.

Contrary to popular belief I think what the X-Men movies need isn't to be part of the all-powerful and critic-proof MCU but to just be under Disney management. Fox might be getting better at commissioning and making non-Wolverine films like Deadpool and The New Mutants but let me put it like this:

The X-Men movie franchise deserves special recognition for being a series whose timeline made no sense before time travel was introduced to the mix. Take Mystique, for example, who we now know to be Xavier's adopted sister and as much as she denies the role she obviously feels a great deal of affection for him and the school.

Then you go back and watch the first movie where she coldly and calculatingly tries to murder Xavier in his home. Character consistency would be nice. Being able to hold on to the core of a team for more than a film would be nice.

A version of Jubilee who bloody does something for a change (and there have been two film versions of the character now) would be nice. Okay, this grudge is purely generational because Jubilee was “my” generation's teenage POV character what with the cartoon and everything but, in all seriousness, could Fox just stop being Fox for a second and allow the POC character they spent as much time introducing as Nightcrawler and Cyclops in on the action?

Actually, now I mention that I notice the utter absence of Karma in the New Mutants trailer.

Fox are dicks, please buy them out, Marvel. 

Maisie Williams is the Doc... I mean, Wolfsbane

I'm about fifty-fifty on the continued existence of the X-Men movies. On the one hand, Logan was just about as perfect an ending as the franchise could ever ask for. On the other hand, I know that Fox are going to keep making these things until the heat death of the universe so I might as well hope for the best.

Not that hoping for the best is an entirely logical course of action here. Fox do have a strong tendency towards ruining a good thing. Take X-Men: First Class, a great reboot for the franchise until Days Of Future Past came along to reveal that it wasn't a reboot after all and, by the way, every character from First Class who wasn't in the opening trilogy is now dead. Brilliant move, Fox.

So imagine my mix feelings when a New Mutants movie was announced. The original New Mutants are, without a doubt, my favourite X-team ever but you know what other characters I love in this franchise? Storm, who in these films is a characterless cipher. Kitty Pryde, who represents the most criminal waste of Ellen Page ever committed to film even before she gets magic time travel powers from nowhere.

The batting average is not high here.

Still, they've just announced that Maisie Williams will be playing Wolfsbane: a shy Scottish Catholic girl who turns into a wolf and has abandonment issues like you wouldn't believe. It is (potentially) a great role and Williams is a fantastic actress, even if she is a bit wasted in Game Of Thrones just by virtue of being part of such a large ensemble cast. Fox has even made a big thing about how they're only auditioning “ethnically appropriate” actors for Sunspot and Dani Moonstar which, given its both Hollywood and Fox, is something of a minor miracle.

I want to hope here but the simple fact is that we've had Deadpool and Logan in rapid succession and that's more quality than Fox has generally been able to put out in so short a time. Now, either they've learnt that they can make more money out of good films or its a fluke.

Please let them have learnt. If they can learn then maybe Warner Bros can take a stab at it. 

Why Logan works and Batman v. Superman didn't

(NO SPOILERS HERE. I'll probably put up a review at the end of the week but this is just a short, general terms discussion of things that are absolutely clear from the trailers and advertising).

Logan is a good film. Actually, its a bloody excellent film but the problem is that what makes it work is basically impossible to copy. Its not the 18 rating (in the US, over here it passed as a 15), though it certainly helps that Wolverine can finally use his claws on people as well as props.

No, what makes this film work is that Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart have been playing these characters for nearly twenty years. Watching these two living in a Mexican shack as broken old men has an emotional resonance that just telling Ben Affleck not to shave and trying to pass him off as an older Batman couldn't hope to.

This is actually a pretty big problem for DC: they keep trying to deconstruct things they never properly constructed in the first place. They tried to do the big blow out fight between Batman and Superman with a Batman we've never met before and a Superman we barely know; they've commissioned a Nightwing movie without doing any work on the idea of what Robin is so we can't appreciate what it is in this world for Dick to have moved on from the role; we were expected to care about Wonder Woman over a year before we got her origin story.

Not that I think DC are the only ones scheming away trying to work out how to make their own Logan. You can bet your arse that some misguided soul at Sony is trying to wrestle Spider-Man: Reign into a pitch document, an idea that might just have worked if Tobey Maguire was still in the role but there's not enough make-up on Earth to turn Tom Holland into Old Man Peter Parker so we'd end up with yet another live action Spider-Man.

So let's... not, okay? Let's allow a unique film based on unique circumstances no one could have planned to remain the singular little gem it is and move on to good ideas.

Please?

On Jennifer Lawrence's ongoing Mystique

[Just to be clear: I have not watched X-Men: Apocalypse yet and this post will contain zero spoilers as a result.]

On the one hand I don't think I can really complain about Jennifer Lawrence wanting to do more X-Men movies. She's a fantastic actress and hopefully her future appearances will lean more towards the First Class than the Days of Future Past. So, definitely something to cautiously look forward to.

On the other hand, though, Fox's X-Men movies have a tendency towards mediocrity, a horrible “oh, just get it made” attitude that squandered the promise of the First Class reboot in the very next film. Until now everyone has been assuming that Fox's plan was to keep turning out X-Men films until Hugh Jackman ages out of the part, quits or dies and we were all sort of okay with that. There have been a few genuinely great movies in the franchise. It doesn't break anywhere near even on the good/bad divide but there have been good ones.

I'm not going to lie, I want to see Marvel and Fox come to a Spider-Man style shared custody deal and the one thing standing in the way of that until now was Hugh Jackman, a middle-aged man. Now Fox has Jennifer Lawrence's star power to rely on into the future and she's twenty years younger than him.

Then again, this is Hollywood we're talking about so she probably "counts" as being the same age as Jackman so the overall plan might remain unchanged.