12 Easy Solutions To Save The X-Men Franchise

For various reasons, important figures in the X-Men mythology have been badly misrepresented by the movies to date. Former Interpol agent and tough Irish b*stard Banshee was reduced to a teenage stereotype and killed between movies; Wolverine’s nemesis Sabretooth went from being a feral mass-murderer, the thing that Logan is most terrified of becoming, to a sarcastic a-hole with big sideburns that pounces on people like an excited kitten.

Mystique is not a hero. Not even in the movies. She’s a founder member of the Brotherhood Of (Evil) Mutants. The Raven Darkholme in the comics tends to be a ruthless pragmatist with almost no scruples or ideals whatsoever: the Mystique in X-Men, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand was a ruthless idealist and martyr to the mutant cause.

Between X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Jennifer Lawrence (playing the younger Mystique) became the highest grossing action heroine in cinema history with The Hunger Games. Since then - and especially in X-Men: Apocalypse - Lawrence has made it crystal clear that she doesn’t want to be in the X-Men films anymore.

Unfortunately, she’s contractually obligated to do them: and to capitalise on her fame, they’ve skewed the character to keep her at the forefront of the narrative, even to the extent that Lawrence is delivering the big motivational speeches and spending most of the film out of makeup.This heroic icon to the mutant people isn’t any version of Mystique. It’s a version of Jennifer Lawrence’s character from the Hunger Games, a cynical cash-in, nothing more.

Cyclops, on the other hand, is the real deal: the team’s leader and the definitive X-Man. This is a kid who had the worst childhood you can imagine, a boy who was pretty much saved by Xavier. Driven to the point of obsession, he's transformed himself into the perfect leader, but he's also a mass of scar tissue in the shape of a man, and can be pretty f*cking scary to boot.

Now, James Marsden is a wonderful actor in many ways, but he’s not Cyclops. Those lasers in his noggin aren’t Cyclops’ optic blasts either, by the way. They’re beams of concussive force, and they don’t set fire to trees.

You can have an X-Men movie without Mystique… but you shouldn’t be able to make an X-Men movie without Cyclops. Professor X might have had the dream about co-existence, but Cyclops is the man who’s charged with keeping it alive: he should be front and centre in any new X-Men movies.