6. X-Men: First Class
Why The Franchise Failed: Staleness of ideas and a borked screenplay.
Why it Re-Succeeded: Tearing up the rulebook and trying something new, in glorious style. I told you I'd be back for Ratner. Everyone knows how much of a disaster and colossal disappointment X-Men: The Last Stand was, although if I'm honest not all of it can be laid at the director's door. He came into proceedings quite late, with much of the script and cast already decided. But still, the fact he helmed something which promised so much the acclaimed Dark Phoenix storyline and turned it into an anti-climactic mess which put him at the same level of geek pariah-dom as Joel Schumacher. It's never too difficult to nail the 'substance' of X-Men' the civil rights analogies are always present and correct, and can be mined for script-writing gold. However, as befitting its status as one of the trailblazing early noughties superhero films, it suffered from the need to look 'normal,' eschewing some of the more out-there designs for safe-and-boring black leather suits and a need to ground everything in the super-serious. In this regard, throwing the whole lot in the bin and drenching the prequel in Bond-esque glamour and frippery was a masterstroke, giving the film a distinctive flair the originals especially Last Stand sorely lacked. Really, all they could do with the X-Men franchise was tear it up and start again. Aside from the aesthetic, they did this in an extremely inventive way, using the first film's intriguing prologue where a teenage Magneto bends a concentration camp gate and expanding upon it massively. Strengthened by an awesome turn from a pre-phone-shilling Kevin Bacon as an excellent Sebastian Shaw, and an ass-kicking, occasionally Irish-sounding new cast, the film hit the heights where its predecessor (and the godawful Wolverine standalone) failed, opening itself up to next year's quasi-sequel Days Of Futures Past.