Even before the imminent purchase of Fox by Disney was front-page news, the film studio responsible for decades worth of X-Men and Fantastic 4 movies was the subject of an increasing amount of scrutiny. Although the studio hit a rough patch with their Marvel properties in the mid-2000s, they crawled back into the public’s good graces through a series of exceptional and varied X-films.
X-Men: First Class returned the X-franchise to its classic comic roots: introducing a younger version of the iconic team, a fresh cast to fill out the now-familiar roles and costumes made using actual colors for a change (rather than the black leather suits that had been the film franchise’s running aesthetic since 2000). Days of Future Past, for my money the best X-team movie, deftly balanced what should have been an unwieldly cast stretched over two far-flung time periods while seamlessly erasing every troublesome movie that Fox had released in the series over the preceding decade an a half (virtually all of them).
Deadpool, Fox’s first R-rated film, was a breath of fresh air for a genre that was increasingly looking like paint-by-numbers filmmaking (and the upcoming sequel thankfully looks to be more of the same, only with a bigger budget). Most recently, Logan put the last lingering elements of the early X-movies to rest: closing the book of Patrick Stewart’s Professor Xavier, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and the entire first generation of X-Men.
Really, the only hiccup in the franchise’s recent history was the middlingly received X-Men: Apocalypse. Although a well enough film in its own right, setting up a new generation of X-Men including fan favorites Nightcrawler, Cyclops and Jean Grey, it lacked the focus and polish of the recent X-films and caused a more than a few series fans to fear that the studio had already lost whatever second wind it found with Matthew Vaughn in 2011.
Naturally, Fox wanted to rekindle the passionate fanbase that they had struggled to win back after disastrous films like X-Men United and X-Men Origins. Their solution was a second pass at one of the most iconic X-stories in the expansive canon: one that they had botched so horribly a decade ago that the series was at one point written off as a complete wash. That story, of course, is the unimpeachable Dark Phoenix Sage, which follows Jean grey’s descent into villainy and genocide.
You would think that that alone would have been enough to carry a movie. They only introduced the two keystone characters, Scott Summers and Jean Grey, in the last team outing. Rather than developing them over a second, unrelated adventure and then bringing their budding relationship to a head in the Dark Phoenix adapation, they need to cover that, Grey’s revolution as a character, her abominable actions, the intergalactic response to the same and the final showdown of the X-Men on the Moon (yes, the Moon moon).
Evidently not, though. It has been teased out that there is going to be a second villain (or third, I guess, if you count the Shi’ar as villains), which has caused a great deal of speculation on the part of X-fans to nail down exactly who will be appearing in the upcoming film. The obvious answer would be Mr. Sinister: an iconic X-foe that has appeared in the background in several recent X-titles, but the evidence is beginning to suggest otherwise.
Recent hints at this new antagonist’s identity suggest that it might be connected with Xavier directly. It states that the X-Men’s biggest challenge is none other that Xavier’s “growing ego,” which many have taken to mean his villainous alter-ego: Onslaught.
Onslaught is the kind of over-complicated 90’s comic book villain that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose lasting legacy has left much to be desired. Simply put (or at least as simply as someone like Onslaught can be put), Onslaught is a psionic energy — a creature made of pure psychic energy — that resulted from fusing Professor Xavier and Magneto into a single person. He was a virtually omnipotent being capable of taking on the entire Marvel Universe, all while keeping the truth of his origins hidden from even the X-Men.
As excited as I am for the film — and I really am, given the strength of Fox’s recent X-offerings — I desperately hope that this rumor proves to not be true. The film is already packed to the gills with content that really should have been stretched out and developed over several installments. The last thing that it needs is to throw in one of the 90’s stupidest villains into the mix.
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