10 Movie Trilogies That Had The WORST Endings
8. X-Men
The first two X-Men movies remain one of the strongest one-two punches in superhero movie history: the first helped pave the way for so many other comic book films, and the sequel one-upped its predecessor in basically every way.
Fans were admittedly a little concerned when director Bryan Singer quit the threequel, X-Men: The Last Stand, to make Superman Returns instead, especially once his replacement was announced to be Rush Hour's Brett Ratner.
Even so, if he was working from the same material as Singer, how bad could it be?
Except, Singer ended up taking X2 writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty with him when he left, and hadn't carved out even a basic story for Ratner to work from before leaving.
As a result, it's not terribly surprising that The Last Stand feels like a massive step down from its predecessors: a writing and directing team attempting to deliver an imitation that lacks the same intelligence and filmmaking skill.
Ultimately, the primary issue lies with the script, which showed a blatant lack of reverence for the X-Men source material by bungling the iconic Dark Phoenix arc, while killing off or sidelining numerous key characters.
It was such a deflating ending to the original X-Men trilogy that Singer eventually came back and retconned it into oblivion with the prequel-sequel X-Men: Days of Future Past.