12 Easy Solutions To Save The X-Men Franchise

…fun.

The odd one-liner aside, fun is something singularly lacking from the X-Men franchise. The closest we’ve come to a genuinely pervasive sense of fun was X-Men: First Class, and Matthew Vaughn’s winsome take on the swinging sixties.

That lasted for around the first half of the film… and then went into the toilet as soon as we were introduced to the mutant Nazi who experimented on other mutants in Auschwitz. Sebastian Shaw had made a blood enemy of Magneto, which depressingly gave us both default X-Men movie plots at one and the same time. Thank god one of them was Kevin Bacon.

Quicksilver gave us a moment of spectacular fun in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, a film that was otherwise bleaker than bleak. We could do with some more of that, because not every mutant hates being a mutant, you know?

Nightcrawler is a case in point: a wisecracking, devil-may-care swashbuckler with a heart of gold. Blessed with a prehensile tail, the man Errol Flynns around fencing with three swords at once. That’s wonderful. Why isn’t that all over our cinema screens?

Instead, X2 proffered a tattooed case of Catholic guilt, and X-Men: Apocalypse gave us Kid Nightcrawler with his Flock Of Seagulls haircut. Both versions of Kurt Wagner were good as far as they went (and frustratingly, nearly great), but we need more.

We need a real Fastball Special, not an ersatz Colossus swinging around and chucking a man nearly the same size as him. We need tongue-in-cheek superpowered games of baseball, volleyball, dodgeball; we need X-Men: Apocalypse’s trip to the mall, only with an actual trip to the mall, complete with image inducers going on the fritz and panicked soccer moms and security guards.