Ever since the X-Men first appeared back in 1963, Cyclops has always been regarded as the leader of the team. While he takes on a similar role in the movie franchise, instead of the strong and confident leader that he is portrayed as in the comic books the big-screen version of the character is a bland, uninteresting and overlooked part of the cast and even comes off as a whiny little b*tch on occasion. No core member of the X-Men has been given a shorter shrift in the movies than Cyclops, who got less and less to do as the series went on. One of the defining traits of the team is the ongoing one-upmanship between Scott Summers and Logan, and while it is explored with a couple of great quips in the first movie Cyclops quickly becomes a background character while Wolverine moves front and center, with the love triangle also involving Jean Grey essentially boiling down to Cyclops frequently saying 'stay away from my girl'. Well-developed, he certainly is not. In X-Men 2, Cyclops is missing in action for a great deal of the story after being captured by Magneto, and only returns in the third act under mind control before grieving in the wake of Jean's self-sacrifice. Things got even worse in the next movie, with James Marsden given less than five minutes of screentime before he is unceremoniously killed off, and is barely even mentioned again by any of the other characters bar a quick glimpse of some floating glasses and a gravestone. It seems that the writers had no idea what to do with Cyclops, and decided that the best route was to give him an increasingly brief amount of screentime before getting rid of him entirely, though he did make an all-too-brief cameo during the epilogue of Days of Future Past. A teenage Scott Summers also makes a forgettable appearance in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and the character will return in the younger guise of Tye Sheridan in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. With a talented up-and-comer like Sheridan in the potentially key role, hopefully the long-running franchise will finally find a good use for one of the source material's most important characters, because so far it has been unbelievable just how dull the movies have made a guy that can shoot frickin' laser beams from his frickin' eyes.
I don't do social media, so like or follow me in person but please maintain a safe distance or the authorities will be notified. Don't snap me though, I'll probably break. I was once labelled a misogynist on this very site in a twenty paragraph-long rant for daring to speak ill of the Twilight franchise. I stand by what I said, it's crap.
