Twentieth Century Fox has just recently confirmed that Brian Singer will return to the X-Men movie franchise X-Men: First Class. Singer is the director of the first two (and arguably best) X-Men movies; X-Men and X2: X-Men United.
The X-Men franchise has had a bit of a sorted history at Fox. When X-Men originally came out it proved to be a very solid movie helmed by Singer, establishing not only a solid movie franchise, but also reinvigorating the comic movie genre, and making a mainstream star of Hugh Jackman. X2 was then released a few years later and really set the water mark for a great comic book movie, surpassing the original movie in almost every aspect. It also set up what could have been a great trilogy with the ‘final’ film, X-Men: The Last Stand.
Unfortunately, that dream scenario never came to pass. Instead, Singer left the production of The Last Stand to film Superman Returns, and left Fox to hire new key staff to resume production. However, due to time constraints and other issues with directors, Fox was unable to readily obtain a director to seamlessly resume the production of the movie, and wound up hiring Brett Ratner (Rush Hour series) to direct the movie in Singer’s absence. With an aggressive time-frame (far too aggressive), and only using part of the story Singer intended to use, Fox quickly resumed production of the movie to get it out in the time they wanted.
The end result was the X-Men franchise going from the greatness of X-Men and X2, to X-Men: The Last Stand and the more recent X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The Last Stand winded up becoming a special effects centric film that lacked practically all the great elements of the previous two movies, and wrapped it up with one of the worst scripts I’ve seen (at least for a comic book movie adaptation). Save for some great SFX shots (i.e. Xavier and Magneto in the beginning of the movie), it was a sad, sad affair. X-Men Origins: Wolverine faired even worse, again lacking in elements that made the first two movies in the franchise so good, and again hampered by a terrible script, despite retaining Hugh Jackson in the title role (IMHO one of the best actors in the business, hands down).
Superman Returns — for one reason or another — never panned out as a follow-up series to the original Superman movies, and Singer looked at the possibility of coming back to the X-Men franchise while also managing his other projects. Now with this recent confirmation from Fox it looks like Singer is coming back to direct the series that he made famous with his directing.
Now don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t feel that Brian Singer is the only director that can handle the X-Men franchise, or steer it in the right direction, but I think it’s safe to say that that the franchise went way off course without his involvement. Having the ‘originator’ of the movie franchise back driving the ship can hopefully do it some very much needed justice, and put it at least the core X-Men movies back on track to greatness. Fox also has some projects around Magneto and Deadpool in the works, and I can only hope that they also turn out better than the last two movies as well. Like all films, it all really depends on who is involved with the production.
Read More: Brian Singer to direct ‘X-Men: First Class’
