What every X-Men movie is about

One of the more shocking franchise developments of 2019 is how hard X-Men crashed and burned. The latest installment, Dark Phoenix, which I saw as my final movie on the flight home on Sunday, made a pitiful $65 million at the box office in the U.S., and barely a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. That’s nothing these days. It makes it only the 28^th biggest domestic money earner of 2019, but that alone probably does not provide useful perspective. More useful is that means it currently lands between Good Boys and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in terms of earnings, though both of those are still in theaters and will likely surpass Dark Phoenix. (Good Boys, of course, already has.) By the end of the year it will be no higher than 50th, probably. 

It seems an unthinkable outcome for a series that stars A-listers Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence and James McAvoy, and in this installment boasts A-lister Jessica Chastain, as well as major riser Sophie Turner of Game of Thrones fame. Of course, it’s not even the stars who are specifically supposed to sell a franchise like this, but the brand itself, which has produced nine previous movies – three in the first saga, three so far in this saga, and three Wolverine spinoffs. (Not all of these movies came under the same studio banner, but that hardly matters.)

While watching X-Men: Dark Phoenix, though, I realized why we’ve finally dropped the series: Each movie is about the exact same thing.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s been a single X-Men movie that didn’t involve the uneasy tension between mutants and the world governments that seek to contain them. In each movie, the potential value of a team of superheroes working for good is offset against the potential disaster of their collective destructive force. Each X-Men movie has involved someone proposing to or actually quarantining these X-Men for further research/imprisonment. Each X-Men movie has involved the good X-Men trying to convince the bad X-Men to fight for the greater good rather than their own self-interest and/or survival. And each X-Men movie has dealt with one particularly powerful mutant struggling to control that power while reconciling their anger with their better instincts.

And I think I’ve actually made it sound more interesting than it actually is. Lines of dialogue have become increasingly disposable or interchangeable the more of these movies there have been, as the core conflicts have gotten more and more boring. To give you an idea of the difference between the franchise era we live in now and the one we did 15 years ago, the first X-Men franchise had the good sense, as it were, to end after three movies with X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006, a movie most people did not like. Of course, that ending was humorously short-lived, as the series was rebooted only four years later with X-Men: First Class.

We have now blown past the disliked third movie in this incarnation of the series, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, to deliver a fourth, even less-liked X-Men, Dark Phoenix. The difference is that nowadays you can’t quit when you start to get behind. Maybe they thought focusing on Jean Grey, who had not previously been a part of this saga, would give the series new life, especially as it helped with the modern mandate of replacing the traditionally male protagonists with a clear female protagonist. (Which is one of the reasons Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique has been so elevated in prominence even though she was a total side character in the original series.) But that thinking ended up being flawed, or at the very least, not enough.

What they should have realized was that if they were going to make a fourth X-Men movie in the current timeline, it had to actually be different in some way. Logan might have been a good example to them. That really deviated from what we knew previously of X-Men with its R rating and with its deaths of two major characters. Perhaps some of Logan did rub off, as Dark Phoenix kills off a major character, though I won’t say who. The fact that this development carries almost no impact shows just how far this series has fallen in the decade since it began with such promise.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is not an awful movie, but its mediocrity, its reliance on such played out ideas and such familiar tropes, kind of makes it one. Then there are the problems with its execution, like its literal darkness – for some reason they decided to shoot almost all the major set pieces at night. Never a good idea.

I can see how they thought that Dark Phoenix was probably good enough, given its enviable cast and the fact that we’ve been receptive to these ideas in the past. But we will only receive for so long. And now the future for the X-Men franchise seems dark indeed.

Which I’m not mourning. I need a break from X-Men. But if they’d handled it a bit more deftly, maybe I wouldn’t. The best franchises are the ones that you eagerly greet with every new installment, because they are different enough from each other to warrant further exploration. But it feels like there’s really nothing left to explore here, and maybe there never will be.