Ugh, a follower asked me if I had faith in Mutant Saga and I clicked away and lost the message so hopefully they see this, but also I get asked this a lot so I wanted to make a larger post that may piss some of you off. I’m sorry in advance.
First, the X-Men are so much bigger than any one creative, myself included. Would I have loved to write, direct, steer the live action films? Of course. But I have great faith that there are amazing artists out there who have amazing visions and stories to tell with the X-Men.
Now, do I have faith in the MCU’s Mutant Saga?
Short answer: Not yet, no. And let me walk through why so you don’t think I’m just being a hater.
X-Men requires planning, deep planning to pull them off and make them resonate. You also have to be very mindful of how you’re laying out their story, and the way in which audiences will experience the story. You also need to suppress your ego to “make it your own” and focus on meeting the mutants on THEIR terms, which means deeply respecting their canon and the emotional investment that fans have in that canon.
With this in mind , this is the start of Mutant Saga:
- A retcon and musical sting in Ms Marvel that she’s now somehow a mutant. Literally, our first intro to the X-Men in the MCU is not one of the decades worth of mutants but a YA retcon that Kevin forced onto the franchise to “make it his own” and out the “MCU spin.” And it is a tease and retcon that they still have not paid off.
- To the above, for DECADES X-Men fans have waited for teenage mutants like Jubilee and Kitty Pryde to get their justice and due in film. Kevin knows this, but just like Fox shoved a teenage retcon’d Rogue down our throats, Kevin and Marvel are shocked Khan down our throats when far more interesting mutants would do. It’s a fuck you to fans, and having been in the room with these guys it is absolutely all ego. Even having a newly cast Jubilee show up at the end of Ms Marvel to recruit her would’ve been better than the instantly forgettable tag we got.
- A weird nostalgia cameo of Professor X in Doctor Strange 2 that used the animated series sting, where Kevin thought it’d be fresh and cool to see the revered leader and activist visionary of the X-Men’s entire creed get brutally murdered…AGAIN.
- Next, Monica Rambeau somehow finding herself transported back to meet Beast from THE WORST X-MEN movie ever made. Add that these two characters have ZERO history or irony to having met one another in the same way that say Nick Fury coming to meet Tony Stark had in Phase 1. All the tags in Phase 1 begged a clear exciting story — the creation of the Avengers. What the hell does Beast and Monica tease? Nothing. It’s just a desperate play to make us care. Want a better tag? What if the film ended with Monica or Carol waking up to meet….Anna Paquin’s Rogue? Now THAT does what the MCU’s phase one tags did.
- the retries of Wolverine and Deadpool from the Fox franchise that the MCU and Kevin had zero to do with, to tell a fan-pandering story of Reddit-wishlists that seemed to say farewell to the Fox universe. Again. And yet again, the MCU being like Fox in this lazy reliance on Wolverine as the face of the X-Men.
- A contrived MacGuffin plot of adamantium in Captain America Brave New World that has amounted to nothing, and begs timeline questions where I guess Ms Marvel is a mutant before Wolverine entered Weapon X.
- Lastly, all the Fox characters we thought were gone and dead, are being brought out YET AGAIN to manufacture artificial interest and distract from Kevin and decade long flailing of frequent failures.