6. Bryan Singer Directed X Men 3
Would we have had a different film had Bryan Singer not skipped off to direct a rather dull Superman Returns? Probably so. We all now how it turned out. A rushed hash job of a plot (bafflingly, it is as short as the first X Men, which serves as a pilot to a bigger story) with terrible casting (Vinnie Jones' Juggernaut, forgettable mutants (most of the Brotherhood) and a terrible take on the epic Phoenix saga. But it could have been so much more. The second film had already set up the Phoenix saga and here's what the writer of X-Men 2 Mike Dougherty had to say about the threequel he and Bryan Singer had envisioned before moving across to DC to work on Superman.
"The idea you open up with Alkali Lake but it's completely barren and dried up and there are these odd reports of strange phenomena going on around the world accompanied by bright lights in the sky."The idea would be that both the X-Men and the Brotherhood realize that essentially a very god-like force had entered their reality and that it was causing disruptions around the world mutant prisons being decimated. I had pitched an idea about a fleet of cargo ships getting torn apart in the Atlantic and you found out that they were shuttling mutants as slave labor.""So basically you found out was that Phoenix was going round the world taking things into her own hands and that she had basically returned as a god, which they did touch upon in X3. She had viewed herself as above the conflict, that she was here to end things on her terms, she was basically sick of the fighting and she was going to take things into her own hands and she didn't give a s**t what the X-Men or the Brotherhood had to say about it." That sounds fantastic, and a worthy follow up to Singer's first two X Men films. It certainly makes the whole humanity versus mutants story much more global and does something spectacular with Jean Grey / Phoenix, rather than making her stand around looking gormless in a red dress as she did for most of the actual third X Men film. The idea that it is bigger than both the X Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants suggest that we might have had Magneto and Professor X working together, bringing their relationship full circle. Plus we would have likely got some spectacular sequences along the lines of The Avengers. To say that the only decent action piece in X Men: The Last Stand is Magento ripping up the Golden Gate Bridge to attack Alactraz shows how small the film actually got. Plus maybe the film would have given Cyclops something decent to do. Watching his love out of control and leading the X Men in the field would have given him some of the depth and character readers of the comics would have known. At least Bryan Singer plans to rectify some of the mistakes from X Men: The Last Stand in X Men: Days Of Future Past. But is it too little, too late?