X-Men: 9 Things That Must Happen In The Next Film
7. The Villain Needs To Destroy Less And Amount To More
One of X-Men: Apocalypse's biggest missteps was En Sabah Nur himself. As far as villains go, Apocalypse has the most boring and basic of motivations: he wants to destroy the world (and subsequently remake it). Compared to previous villains, he's a massive step down in complexity. Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw, for example, was heavily tied up in Magneto's tragic backstory, giving audiences a reason to hate him, while Peter Dinklage's Trask emerged from a society totally in fear of mutants. There was a human context to the previous villains that made their despicable actions in some way relatable.
Apocalypse, on the other hand, seemed to fit more of a cinematic function than a compelling narrative one, allowing for huge scenes of ludicrous CGI-laden destruction and grand, melodramatic statements about destroying the world.
Moving forward, X-Men needs to seriously scale back on the scope of the villain. At the very least their threat shouldn't revolve around repeatedly showing famous landmarks being blown off the globe. Apocalypse seems to be setting up for Mr Sinister to appear, which sounds like a much safer bet. The franchise has tackled the whole human versus mutants thing quite well so far, so seeing an evil genius attempting to perfect human evolution would be fitting, and a much more personal conflict. The best villains are ones that are a response to the world in which they exist, and as X-Men has proved in the past that it's great at pulling such characters off.