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If you haven’t noticed, yours truly is a big comic book nerd, and has been for many, many years. Decades, even. In fact, if my occasionally not-so-great memory serves, this traces back to circa 1980 when a very young Clint stumbled across his older sister’s small collection of Uncanny X-Men, a small collection which just happened to cover most of the Dark Phoenix saga.
Fast forward to these rather incredible times when comic book stories have hit the mainstream, but that particular saga, still considered one of the best stories ever told in comics, has yet to be successfully translated to the big screen. Oh, I’ve had hopes. Back in the early oughts Dawn and I got extremely excited at the closing moments of X-2 when the Phoenix symbol showed up on the waters of the burst dam where we last saw Jean Grey sacrificing herself so everyone else could get to safety. It wasn’t precisely the tale told in the comics but the main points were there, and third film could start the ball rolling.
Well, now of course we know that ball rolled right off the cliff with the utter misfire that was X-Men: Last Stand. Fox really squandered all that potential, to the point where they ditched everything and started over. YMMV on whether the various attempts since then were good, but in the meantime a new production company called Marvel Studios emerged in 2008 and started a relentless march of introducing, developing and merging the stories of various superheroes into an entertainment juggernaut, despite not having the rights to Juggernaut or any other X-Men or X-Men adjacent characters.
It’s all a complicated story, but when Marvel Comics fell on hard times in the late 1990s they ended up selling off the movie rights to a lot of their more well-known characters like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and yes, the X-Men. Marvel Studios had to make do with the leftovers, and despite what some revisionists might claim Iron Man prior to 2008 was no A-lister. Where Sony and Fox seem to stumble about looking for the proper way to showcase their own Marvel characters on the big screen in a consistently well-received manner, Kevin Feige was a steady hand on Marvel Studios’ tiller that led to success after success both with mainstream audiences and nerds such as myself. They just seemed to get what it was about the comics characters that made them last in the first place, and even if some of the details were changed the heart and soul was there. (Source: me legit tearing up during the first Captain America movie the moment I could tell they were getting him right.)
Anyhow, why am I blathering on about this? Well, for one thing, Marvel Studios has achieved quite a feat in terms of chaining their movies into long-form storytelling on a scale unprecedented in cinema, if not unprecedented in comics. They took their lessons from the comics and it paid off, and at this point I basically look forwards to anything they announce. I can’t say that about the films put out by Fox. I enjoyed Logan, for example, but for me all signs right now are pointing to them flubbing a second attempt at the Dark Phoenix saga. It’s just too rushed to have the proper weight.
And that’s a shame, but I feel X-citement as I write this blog on Tuesday night, because in less than half an hour it will be 9:02 PM PST, otherwise known as the moment the Disney/Fox merger finally clinches and the X-Men officially “come home” to Marvel Studios. Dark Phoenix will most likely still be released, and Feige tends to have things planned out years in advance enough that I wouldn’t expect any X-movies in the immediate future, but hey, just the thought of a decent Fantastic Four at long last has my antennae perked. Or at least a proper introduction to Doctor Doom, which I feel needs the kind of patience and build-up that Marvel Studios has proven very, very good at.
And hell, audiences were just fine with the MCU version of Spider-Man swinging his way onto their screens only a handful of years after Sony made their last solo attempt. Maybe sometime in the next decade, an MCU Jean Grey will be introduced, and built upon, and finally the epic saga of my youth will play out to my satisfaction.