1. Hes The End Of The World
after all, hes a genuine threat, not just to the X-Men, but to the entire world, an extinction-level antagonist the mutants have never encountered before. The seven films in the X-Men series havent exactly thrown up great threats and terrifying antagonists to date. Weve had three movies where the big bad is a mutant hating military scientist (two of which were the same man two decades apart), two movies where the plot revolves around Logan and some bad surgery, Magneto popping up like a charismatic bad penny without actually having much in the way of a plan, and an extremely successful attempt to make the Dark Phoenix saga seem boring. Theres not much happening in these films. Theres certainly not much in the way of menace to mankind. Out of all of the previous movies, Shaws plans for a nuclear Armageddon are the most world-threatening and also the stupidest. Shaw may be able to absorb energy, but precious few other people can. Whats he going to do, rule an irradiated desert with decades of nuclear winter on his lonesome? Apocalypse is the first genuinely evil, serious threat that the X-Men have encountered onscreen. A godlike creature that's long forsaken his humanity, whose millennia of planning will bring about a terrifying agenda that involves the entire world for generations to come, hes powerful enough to hold off the entire team on his own. He brings with him Sinister, the Four Horsemen and legions of devoted followers, and further plot strands for future movies fly about the second hes introduced. He's also a gigantic freaky shapechanging monster, if that helps.
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