8 Superhero Movie Concept Designs Better Than We Actually Got

6. Marvel Girl, Cyclops, And Mystique (X-Men: Apocalypse)

Fox/Alan Villanueva

After getting on a good run of sorts with First Class, Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Deadpool, Fox's X-Men series reverted to type with X-Men: Apocalypse, a film set in the eighties involving one of the most famous comic book villains going.

Those who stuck with the film will already know that it teased the team's more comics-accurate outfits at the ending, but for most of it, they're stuck in what can only be described as a bunch of generic flight-suits. While those final outfits are great too, they still manage to fall short of what was teased in the film's concept art, which also showed off a different actor in the role of Jean Grey.

X Men Apocalypse Concept Art
Fox/Joshua James Shaw

Alan Villanueva's art for the film actually shows Elle Fanning in the part of Jean, with the actor having apparently topped Fox's shortlist for the part prior to the casting of Sophie Turner.

In any case, the outfit is classic X-Men through and through, and though Cyclops too got a more comics-accurate costume in the finale, it doesn't look quite as good as it did at the conceptual stage, with costume designer Joshua James Shaw having gone all out with classic suits for him and Mystique.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.