Days of Future Past and the Grave That Should Stay Dug
Days of Future Past is the film that stops the Fox universe being one line. It repairs the timeline and restores the mansion, Jean, Scott and Xavier, then the franchise stops caring about the repair almost immediately, which turned out to be more productive than if it had worked. Apocalypse makes it messier and Logan does its own thing. I don’t think it explains how Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen get back, since it edits one timeline rather than crossing universes, so it isn’t a map of Doomsday. What it does prove is that audiences will accept two casts playing the same characters without the story collapsing, and Doomsday’s whole approach stands on that. The Sentinels are still the franchise’s best villain as well, which is useful to know when you see what Cyclops is up against in the X-Men teaser.
Logan is the film I’m most protective of as December gets closer. It’s one of the best comic book films anybody has made and I’ve stopped hedging about it. The scene in the motel where Xavier thanks Logan for a night that was almost nice is the best thing Stewart’s done across twenty-six years of playing him, and it’s close to unbearable. The Reavers are personal for me, I wanted more of them, but the villain was never the Reavers, it’s the adamantium. So Stewart coming back is the one part of this I’m uneasy about, even though the MCU’s already killed a different Xavier in Multiverse of Madness and that wasn’t him either. And then you get the July trailer, about 1:19 in, with Xavier sitting in front of stained glass across from somebody in a dark hood. It’s the shot I most want to see the rest of. Let this grave stay dug, though.
The Void and the Wrong Credits Scene
Deadpool & Wolverine is the film that opens the door. I wrote about it in 2024 as a Deadpool film with good taste in Fox references, and that badly undersells it. It establishes that pruned timelines exist and that people can come out of them, so the machinery for putting Stewart, McKellen and Grammer back on a screen is already built. The Void plays like a set for a third act, and it’s the most consequential thing in the movie. Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova is very nearly a distraction from it, and she’s comfortably the strongest antagonist of the era. Jackman’s Wolverine, defined by failure rather than fury, is less fun and a lot more interesting. Don’t expect the anchor-being rule to govern anything, though, because it was a device for one film’s plot and it’s been quietly left where it was.
The Marvels got to the mutants first and hardly anybody saw it. Its credits scene is a plan executed in completely the wrong place, the first concrete step toward Marvel’s biggest crossover sitting in its lowest-grossing release, with Monica crossing into a universe that’s got Grammer’s Beast in it. Monica’s still stranded with no explanation, and she made the crossing first. Iman Vellani’s still the best thing in that film and I’d say it more strongly now, Kamala deserved a better one and will hopefully get a bigger one. The other half of the picture is in the X-Men teaser, which spends most of its running time in a dark, empty mansion before you get a chessboard, Xavier and Magneto, and then Cyclops on his knees, firing at the huge dark shape of a Sentinel while everything burns. If you only read one of my posts on this, make it the X-Men foundation piece, because those two men are why any of it worked.
