#i wanted it to be silly like christopher robin took a picture of them all

[seagull-scribbles]

The found family ever

Edit: Now digitised

[the-desolated-quill]

Okay, Enough With The Live Action/CGI Hybrids - Quill’s Scribbles

So the trailer for the upcoming Sonic The Hedgehog movie came out...

Do I really need to say it? Everyone and their mums have already said it. Hell, you’re probably saying it right now.

Sigh. Okay. Fuck it. I’ll say it.

Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?!?!

The trailer itself is shockingly bad. It looks bland and generic with almost nothing in common with the games. The jokes are forced and painfully unfunny (why are the people in the airport more concerned that the ‘child’ in the bag isn’t James Marsden’s rather than that there’s a fucking child in the bag in the first place?!), Jim Carrey is being his usual obnoxious self and is plain and simply a terrible choice for Doctor Eggman (isn’t the whole point of Doctor Eggman that he’s supposed to, you know, look like an egg?), and the soundtrack is utterly cringeworthy (Gangsta’s Paradise? Really?!?!). But that all pales in comparison to by far and away the biggest problem with the trailer. And I think you can all guess what that is. 

Yes I’m of course referring to the noticeable absence of Team Chaotix. An artistic decision so despicable, it’s practically a hate crime. For shame! Everyone knows that Charmy Bee is the best character in the franchise and yet they don’t have the guts to put him in the movie! Fucking philistines!

...

Oh yeah, and Sonic the Hedgehog looks like a monstrous abomination concocted from the fever dreams of Doctor Frankenstein and Walt Disney.

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about just how grotesque and disgusting this CGI Sonic is. He looks like what your computer would produce if it caught pneumonia. What I especially don’t understand is why they veered away so heavily from the original, iconic design. I mean...

I don’t know about you, but I’d honestly have no problem if the movie just kept this look from the games. Hell, I think even giving him realistic fur would be pushing it. This is perfectly fine. I could totally see this design working in a movie. Instead we get the secret love child of Gollum and Papa Smurf.

He just looks so weird with human proportions. The leg muscles, the two eyes, the human looking teeth. Apparently the filmmakers wanted this Sonic to look as realistic as possible. Because when I pay to see a movie about an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog that can run at supersonic speeds, that’s my first thought. ‘Is it realistic?’

... Jesus Christ.

But of course the main problem with this live action Sonic movie is that it exists in the first place. When it was first announced, I assumed in my naivety that it would be an animated movie. Because that would make sense, right? There have been movie and TV adaptations before and they were all animated. Imagine a big budget computer animated Sonic movie. That would be really cool. But it was not to be. In Hollywood’s infinite wisdom, they decided to go the live action route because... Actually why did they choose to go the live action route? Well that’s what I hope to address in this very Scribble.

Live action adaptations and remakes are nothing new of course. Disney had tried it a few times in the past with movies like 101 Dalmations, there have been other live action versions of animated or illustrated characters such as the Grinch and the Cat In The Hat, Garfield, the Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks, and there was of course the infamous Super Mario Bros movie, which answered the question of what it would be like if the Mushroom Kingdom took place in the same universe as Judge Dredd. But this is the first time live action/CGI hybrids have been huge money spinners. Disney struck gold back in 2010 when Tim Burton’s version of Alice In Wonderland made a billion dollars at the box office and now the company is mining through their back catalogue of Disney classics and giving all their movies the live action treatment. Initially I was okay with this because in the case of Alice In Wonderland and Maleficent they were at least trying to reinterpret the original films and put a new spin on them, but now they just seem to be copying the movies verbatim. Making live action remakes just for the sake of making live action remakes.

Now other studios are trying their hand at, the most notable being Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. Here’s a picture of the original Pikachu:

Cute, right?

Now here’s a picture of the live action Pikachu:

Can you see the problem here?

(also why the hell is Ryan Reynolds the voice of Pikachu? I honestly can’t think of anyone more inappropriate for the role. It’s like casting Samuel L. Jackson as a Powerpuff Girl)

The fact of the matter is some things just don’t work in live action. Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon work in their respective universes because they’re animated creatures in an animated world, and their anatomy and design fit that world. In the real world, it just doesn’t work. Pikachu looks strange and kind of creepy in the real world. The same is true of the other Pokemon. Jigglypuff looks utterly adorable in the games and animated show with its spherical body and cartoon eyes and you just want to take one to bed with you and cuddle them like a teddy bear, but in the real world it looks fucking scary!

I wouldn’t want to cuddle that thing! It looks like it would go for my throat given the opportunity!

The same is true of Sonic. Paramount’s attempts to make him look more ‘realistic’ just makes him look incredibly alien and out of place.

Another example I like to bring up is the film Christopher Robin. Now we all know Winnie the Pooh. Silly ol’ bear. Charming, cuddly and endearing, right? Just look at him.

How can you not fall in love with him?

Now here’s the live action version:

When I first saw the trailer, I was utterly creeped out. He looks like something out of a horror movie. Add to that that they got the original voice actor from the Disney cartoons to reprise the role, and Winnie the Pooh pretty much became the source of all my nightmares for the next couple of weeks. That lovable voice should not be coming out of that... thing.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Look:

Charming and lovable.

Weird and unsettling.

Creative and fun.

Photoshop disaster.

Sweet and likeable.

Fetch my crucifix and holy water.

Emotional and expressive.

So ‘realistic’ to the point where he looks like he has the emotional range of a teaspoon.

Now I recognise this largely comes down to subjective opinion. If you like these CGI redesigns, that’s great. More power to you. But I know for a fact I’m not the only one getting increasingly weirded out by these computer generated demons from Hell.

So why does Hollywood keep making these films. Well obviously in the case of Disney it’s because they’ve ran out of original ideas and want to make a quick buck by exploiting their audience’s nostalgia. (the same can be said of the Star Wars sequel trilogy). But what about other studios? Yes they’re financially motivated too, but there’s got to be more to it than that.

I think it’s largely down to the stigma of animated movies. Animation has become synonymous with children. When you hear the term ‘animated movie’, you automatically associate it with ‘kid’s film’. And ‘kid’s film’ is often used in a negative context. Like it’s somehow lesser than quote/unquote ‘proper’ movies. Live action suggests a certain pedigree. A sense of prestige. But that’s obviously bollocks. The quality of a film isn’t dictated by whether it’s live action or animated. It’s determined by the writing, directing and acting. There have been live action films made for kids and animated films made for adults. And I’m not talking about Sausage Party. I’m talking about Finding Nemo.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Finding Nemo? Isn’t that a kid’s film? No. It’s a family film. And that right there is the problem. You heard me say Finding Nemo, an animated film about talking fish, and you automatically associated it with a kids film. But the thing is Finding Nemo deals with some very dark and adult themes and its moral message of not being overprotective and allowing children to take risks is intended for the parents, not the kids. Obviously kids can still watch and enjoy Finding Nemo, but it’s the parents who are clearly the target here. The same is true of Toy Story 3. Children can still watch and enjoy it, but the film is clearly intended for people who watched the original Toy Story when they were a kid and are now grown up. When you stop and think about it, it’s really sad that family movies are associated with kids movies. Not that there’s anything wrong with kids movies obviously. But why do people assume that family movies are meant for kids? Why can’t they be adult stories that are also accessible to children? Books have done it. The Artemis Fowl series is kid friendly, but its tone, themes and style suggest the author has an older and more sophisticated target audience in mind. A Series Of Unfortunate Events is popular with kids, but it’s adults that get the full experience because of the way Lemony Snicket uses postmodern and meta-textual elements in the books, which would sail clean over the head of a kid reading it. The idea that a live action remake is somehow more ‘grown-up’ than an animated movie is just absurd. The original Lion King was very grown up, thank you very much. There are lots of bright colours and fun songs for the kids, but it also doesn’t sugarcoat the darker themes such as death, betrayal, corruption and abuse of power. Mufaser’s death isn’t going to be made any more impactful in live action. The animated version was more than heartbreaking.

Shifting the conversation back to Sonic, this is also intrinsically linked with another problem with Hollywood at the moment. Movie adaptations of video games. And again, it’s a similar problem. People, especially critics, view video games as being lesser than movies. Roger Ebert famously said that video games will never be considered art. But that’s nonsense. There have been loads of video games that could be and have been considered art. BioShock, for instance, which scrutinises and criticises both objectivism and capitalism. There’s the Mass Effect trilogy, which is often described as this generation’s Star Wars. The Last Of Us is widely considered to be a masterpiece by gamers and literacy scholars alike. Hell, the fact that Hollywood wants to make movie adaptations of video games at all suggests that games do in fact have some inherent artistic value after all. And it’s not as if I’m wholly against making movies based on video games. There are some games that could translate really well to films, Sonic being one of them. (I personally loved the Ratchet & Clank movie, for example. It’s just a shame nobody else fucking watched it due to the almost non-existent marketing). However there’s an inherent problem with translating video games to movies as opposed to, say, translating books to movies. In book to movies adaptations, studios are adding something. Visuals, sound, performance, etc. In video game to movie adaptations, they have to take things away. The most obvious is interactivity. Unlike movies where nothing is required of the audience other than to just dumbly stare at the screen, video games require the audience to actively control the story. Move the character, kill baddies, solve problems and stay alive. You are an active participant in the narrative. As a result, the emotional connection you feel with both the plot and the characters is often stronger than that in a movie because you have direct influence over what happens. 

Also video games have the luxury of being able to tell their stories over the course of eight to thirty to even a hundred hours of gameplay. There’s no way you could condense something like The Last Of Us down to a two and a half hour movie. There would just be too much lost. Important character moments and plot points that would have to be chucked in the bin. Yes things get lost in book to movie adaptations, but nowhere near at the scale of a game to movie adaptation. A possible workaround would be to make game to TV adaptations instead, but then we’re back to the interactivity problem again. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that movies are better than books or that video games are better than movies. I’m just saying they’re each individually suited to tell their own kinds of stories in their own unique ways, therefore translating from one medium to the other is often difficult. The Last Of Us would never make a good movie, and that’s okay. The game is still amazing and the story is still amazing. Its artistic merit isn’t lessened because it can’t be translated to films, in the same way the merits of a bike aren’t lessened because it can’t fly. It’s just not designed to do that.

I guess the point I’m making is there’s no one way to tell a good story. There are an infinite number of ways it can be done. So lets stop Hollywood’s obsession with pigeonholing everything into one format and actually explore the possibilities, shall we?

[autumnfanfiction]

4.

I don’t know how to write love letters either, but you’re worth the try. I want to tell you that you’ve opened me up to the possibility of us getting acquainted. It seems as if since reading your letter my thoughts have transformed and all I can see is the beauty and the aroma of a fresh start and a new beginning. Do you feel it too? I’d love to be your best friend—– you can be Batman, and I’ll ride with you in the passenger seat, Robin. *wink* Yes I wrote wink. Did I make you laugh yet? I see you put your signature as CB, but I want to give you a nickname too, so I’m just going to call you... Pooh Bear because you and your words are as sweet as honey and he’s my favorite. Maybe just Pooh. I don’t know it’ll probably depend on my mood. I can’t wait to meet you, and it’s kind of silly that we’re writing letters to each other when we’re not that far away isn’t it? Well, this can be our thing, and I don’t mind communicating like this a few more times before meeting you. It’s cute and sweet like you are. I’ll be counting the hours for your reply.

💋❤️ GREEN EYES

The dimples in Chris’ cheeks were deep, and when he realized that the letter was coated with her scent, his senses were deeply aroused. Never underestimate the scent of a woman, and hers was sneaking up on him giving him a tingling feeling he’s never felt before.

Of course, he'd bedded his fair share of women, but none of them gave him that feeling, this feeling. He tried his hand at relationships a few times only to feel empty at the beginning. Longing for something more than just sex, meaningless sex. His heart was huge, and he was very selective about who he allowed around him because of that. Time was essential to him and precious in life so he feared that he would waste it on someone that didn’t deserve it. The very reason he’s been single for this long and allowing his art and clothing line to distract him from his personal life. He couldn’t deny himself of one for long, which is why he jumped at the opportunity at getting to know her.

He was very intuitive, so when he had a gut feeling, he always listened. She had to be getting the same feeling he was because he too felt like something was beginning to move in the right direction. Autumn was his favorite season, cradling him with certainty, that what this was growing into with her wouldn’t leave him with anything to disapprove. It was a new opportunity full of positive possibilities, and he couldn’t wait to jump in as he would do with Autumn leaves.

All his life, Autumn was full of grey, and haziness. He enjoyed it, but it always brought melancholic peace, reminding him of his solitude at times when he’d watch and appreciate the beauty of the season, and know he had no one to share it with. It was full of seclusion and quiet introspection of what lay ahead of his journey of life. Now this season was granting him a new friendship, a spark of romance that could shift into a relationship. She felt like Autumn. She was his definition of what it was––– the lovely part of Autumn, not the beautifully sad part, just beautiful. She carried this sense of calmness, softness in her writing, which he presumed was a reflection of who she was. It was one letter, but he felt more with her one letter than he ever did on one date.

Whatever the feeling was, the emotions that revolved around it, was effective, and her sweet aroma pulled him so much he had a headache. But it wasn't painful, in fact, he welcomed it, and he couldn't grasp why or what was going on with his emotions.

He decided to call the woman that might have an answer for him. It rang two times before the face, and sweet voice of his Mother came through. “Hey, Angel.”

“Hey Mama, how are you?”

“I’m great baby, considering the circumstances. I’m just hoping I get good news sooner than later that you’ve beat that cancer before it gets serious. How are you?”

“I feel really good Mama, really. Don’t worry about me I’m under close examination, and the doctors don’t want me to undergo any surgeries or therapy until it’s something really severe. It’s light right now, so I’m just being given medication. I don’t want you to worry until I tell you anything that could actually cause that, okay? You’re way too pretty to be stressing like this Mama.”

He heard his Mother laughed and it caused him to laugh too. “Okay, Angel. I hear you.”

“So I did have a particular reason for this call today.”

“And what would that be?”

“Well, I saw this woman that I’ve never seen in all my months being here and looked for her. To make a short story shorter I wrote her a letter because I was too shy to introduce myself, and she responded, and I’m feeling these things I’ve never felt before Mama.”

“Hmm, feeling what baby?”

“I don’t know, but it’s weird to me. What she wrote made me happy, but it’s a little deeper than that. Her scent is all over her letter, and ever since I caught the scent, it’s tapped into my senses and making me feel some type of way.”

He saw his Mother laugh, smiling on the other end of the phone. “Well I hope the answer I give you satisfies you, and I’m going to do my best to answer it. So you know I’m a believer in the magic, beauty, and muse of love, so I think her scent just went to the part of your brain that has to do with emotion, memory, motivation and triggered these emotions out of you with an intense and lasting effect. It actually is more scientific than anything.”

Chris nodded his head, but he just didn’t seem to understand why his brain treated her scent as if it was familiar because he’d never met her before. “But why her scent?”

“Could be because you already have an established attraction to her. But the judgment center of your brain that deals with senses just thought her scent was worthy, so now it’s stored in your head.”

“Wow.”

“So... you gonna finally find a wife so I can get my grandbabies?”

Chris laughed to the point he was clutching his stomach and started coughing excessively in the process. “Mama...” he kept laughing, and he heard his Mother scoff on the other end which caused his laughter to continue.

“I’m not playing with you Christopher I want my grandbabies. You’re long overdue.”

“Long overdue? I’m 24.”

“Age has nothing to do with it. Just make sure the woman you’re drawn to is a good one so I can meet her.”

“You’re gonna scare her away with all this baby talk.”

“Not if she wants babies she won’t be.” His Mother said as a matter of factly.

He chuckled. “Bye Mama I’m done with you.”

“Bye Angel I love you.”

“I love you too Mama.”

He hung up the phone and laughed to himself as he started writing his second letter. It was way too early for him to be thinking about marriage or children at this stage. He wanted them but down the line and hopefully, he’d be alive long enough to see all that blossom into fruition. Right now he wanted to build a friendship with her and whatever came after would come naturally.

-

A month went by, and the letters were almost an everyday thing. They became more like love letters if they weren’t seen as that already. The sentiments were stronger, and it became apparent that the attraction was there, so it got more serious, with each note. Why they waited so long to see each other? They didn’t know. Perhaps, they were enveloped in the throes of romance that writing love letters encapsulated. There was just something intimate about being able to charm and touch someone’s soul poetically in the realms of love. Being able to touch someone without physically doing so. When they wrote it was a dialect only written for them, each word resonating heavily. It was clear the feelings were mutual it wouldn’t take long for them to get comfortable once they met.

For always,

you have been my honeyed muse

coating my heart with sweetness

giving it rich taste

I could never scrape you away

for you have been the sweetener

towards my sour life

💋❤️ GREEN EYES

Robyn was nervous, to say the least. This would be the first time they’d see each other face to face and other than the little description Gran Gran Dolly gave her from her vision she couldn’t really picture how he’d look like.

She kept every letter he sent her, and each one he wrote was sweeter than the last. He even started sending her roses along with them because she mentioned how much she loved red ones in one of her notes to him. He was the definition of romantic and she’d be a fool to not be swoon by his gentleness.

She’d grown comfortable talking to him and was ready to meet him and take what they were doing further.

“Okay, Robyn calm down.”

When she was finally able to relax, she heard a knock on her door and became nervous all over again. She couldn’t wait to see the man behind all those heartfelt letters that were trying to sweep her off her feet and take her heart as his. She took a few deep breaths before giving him access to enter. “Come in.”

Chris walked in, and her breath got caught in her throat when she saw him.

[aion-rsa]

How The First X-Men Movie Changed The Superhero Genre

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Back in the late 1990s, things didn’t look so hot for superhero movies. Warner Bros. Pictures crashed its Batman franchise into the ground with 1997’s disastrous Batman and Robin and showed no signs of resurrecting either that or any of its other DC comics heroes. Meanwhile, with the one bright exception of 1998’s Blade, not a single Marvel Comics character had made it to the big screen in a meaningful way.

All that changed, however, in 2000, when 20th Century Fox released X-Men.

Based on one of Marvel’s most enduring properties, the Bryan Singer-directed film introduced the concept of mutants via well-loved characters like Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), Magneto (Ian McKellen), Cyclops (James Marsden), Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) and Rogue (Anna Paquin). The story incorporated themes of bigotry, tolerance and family that were present ever since Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the original X-Men comics in 1963.

In other words, the movie took the characters and comics seriously and was actually about something. It was also a surprise hit, earning $296 million worldwide against its relatively slim $75 million budget. It proved that even lesser known (to the general public) comic book characters could star in successful movies, paving the way for not just a succession of X-Men sequels and spin-offs but later achievements like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That first movie, however, took a long and torturous route to the screen. After Fox acquired the rights in 1994 the studio commissioned a series of top shelf screenwriters — including Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven), John Logan (Penny Dreadful), James Schamus (Hulk), Ed Solomon (Men in Black) and Singer collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) — to whip an X-Men script into shape.

While some elements of all their work made it into the finished film, the man who got sole screenplay credit was David Hayter. A writer, producer and actor who got a job in the X-Men production office, Hayter’s began revising the script well into production based on his knowledge of the comics, working with Singer, producer Tom DeSanto, and a young associate producer named Kevin Feige.

They say success has many fathers (and mothers), and in the case of X-Men, there seemed to be a true collaborative effort — even despite turmoil among some of the filmmakers involved — that helped bring X-Men to the screen and arguably launch the era of the modern superhero movie. One of those fathers was David Hayter, who spoke with us extensively by Zoom about the creation of X-Men — which was released 20 years ago this summer — and his role in it.

Den of Geek: I know this story is out there, but how did you get involved with X-Men? You had made a film that Bryan Singer produced, correct?

David Hayter: Basically, we had produced the film, Burn, and Bryan was the executive producer, and we had a deal with Lakeshore, but it fell through. So then I was a depressed, broke film producer. Bryan was kind enough to give me a job answering the phones on X-Men, and he knew me as a filmmaker. Just lucky enough, I had been a huge X-Men fan in the late ’70s, early ’80s, so I knew the characters very well, and Bryan realized he had a resource right in the office for keeping the X-Men the X-Men. It was just a remarkably lucky confluence of events.

He asked you to help him solve something in the script, liked what you did, and the next thing you knew, you started working on the rest of the script.

Correct. Yeah. He couldn’t figure out how to say the word, “X-Men”, to have a character say it without it sounding ridiculous. That sounds silly now, but at the time, was a great concern. So I suggested a scene where Wolverine walked across the mansion grounds, and he runs into Cyclops. And they have a pick-up basketball game, and Cyclops is saying, “Why don’t you join the team?” And it’s getting more heated, and Wolverine says, “Look, why don’t you and Xavier and all your little X-Men go to hell.” And he pops the ball.

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Movies

The First X-Men Movie Almost Featured Beast in Major Role

By Don Kaye

I said, “That way you get your movie star, your lead, to say it, but he’s sort of making fun of it, so that kind of takes the sting off of it being too grand or too ridiculous.” Bryan said, “Yeah, good. Go write that for me.” I figured he was kidding, but he was not. And then he started having me do rewrites. Every day, he’d come up with ideas, or we’d discuss ideas, and I’d be working on it, and he’d tell me not to tell the studio that I was working on the film. 

By the time they figured it out, I’d already rewritten half the script, so they were forced to make a deal with me, and they paid me $35,000, which was the guild minimum rewrite fee. That’s the lowest anyone’s ever been paid for an $80 million film, I believe, in history, and I was thrilled to get it. I worked on the film for the next 13 months.

What was the script looking like when you started working on it? Did you look at any of the past versions and see what they had done?

Oh, yes. Well, like I say, the studio was not thrilled that their phone answer guy was writing the script, so they made me read everything. They sent me old drafts. I read Andrew Kevin Walker’s draft and Ed Solomon’s draft, and I was working off of Chris McQuarrie’s draft. All of whom are legendary writers. 

What was the difference? Well, there had been a lot of different tacks taken. There was a romance between Wolverine and Storm. There were Sentinels, the Danger Room, Beast. There were all sorts of different things. Andy Kevin Walker’s draft was very good, but Bryan had moved onto the basic story that Ed Solomon had created, which was Rogue comes to the mansion, and we introduce the audience through Rogue and Wolverine’s eyes. 

We had 11 super-powered lead characters that weren’t as well-known as Batman, or Superman, or anything like that. So really, the goal with it was keeping it clear, making sure that people understood the world and the powers, the names, everything. The first movie is really, just all setup and a very simple skeleton of the story.

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Movies

How Marvel’s Kevin Feige Influenced the First X-Men Movie

By Don Kaye

There was a tendency to make fun of comics, take it lightly, and for the studios to sort of make the writers approach it that way. The difference here was that Bryan Singer had never read an X-Men comic, and he just wanted to make a great movie with real characters and real interactions, and I wanted to make a real X-Men movie to replicate the experience I had reading the comics when I was a kid.

So it was like lightning in a bottle. It just kind of worked out as a confluence of all our input. Kevin Feige, who at the time was working for Lauren Shuler Donner, was working on the film, and he came into the scripting process. And obviously, Kevin knows the X-Men and the Marvel characters better than anybody. So he became a big influence, as well with Tom DeSanto, the producer of the film.

I read that Andrew Kevin Walker’s script was the only one that actually featured the original team as a fully-fledged team, like the comics.

I’m not sure what that means, because I know it had Storm. If you’re talking about the original team of Cyclops, Iceman, Beast, Angel and Jean Grey, it’s possible, but it also has the quote-unquote new X-Men, Wolverine, Storm. I don’t really recall. I remember they went to Niagara Falls.

Was it a challenge to kind of balance the old and the new, knowing that you would get people who did read the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby comics, and then you’d get people who, to them, the X-Men were all about Wolverine?

Well, I’ve said this before. It sounds callous, but I didn’t work on it or write anything with the idea of pleasing the fans. I worked on it from the perspective of, I was very much in love with the Chris Claremont Uncanny X-Men era, and that’s what I was trying to recreate. 

I mean, I love the original Kirby-Stan Lee books as well, but Wolverine was a revelation. Wolverine is what makes the whole thing really come alive. And so, there was never any question for me that it was going to be anything but that relatively new X-Men team.

I was trying to make the movie feel as much to me like X-Men as I thought it should, and I thought, “If I can really get excited about this, a great many fans will also be excited about it.” 

Tom Rothman, who was the head of 20th Century Fox at the time, said, “David, the comic book fans will be done by 10:00 Friday night, and we have to get everyone else.” So that made it clear to me that, yes, engaging the comic book fans and giving them a true experience was important, but more important was creating a world that an additional group of millions of people could appreciate and attach to. That was really the bigger goal, and I felt that the keys to doing that were in the comic books that I love. 

Do you think that working with an $75-80 million budget — which was not a lot for a superhero movie even back then — help you in a way because you had to focus on character?              

I think that’s correct. I had a huge sequence where Jean and Cyclops go to get a mutant who has frozen his entire school, which, of course, is Bobby (Drake. a.k.a Iceman), and it was really cool, but very expensive. And they were like, “It doesn’t drive the narrative, so it doesn’t stay in.”

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Movies

X-Men Movie Writer Says He’d Gladly Help Bring Mutants Into The MCU

By Don Kaye

So we were forced to focus on more character. But the problem with that was the first cut of the movie was like two hours and 10 minutes long, and we called it, “Woody Allen’s X-Men” because it was just all talk and there wasn’t enough action to sustain the film.

The first cut I saw, I was like, “I think we’re just dead. I guess I’ll go back to bartending or something.” And then Avi Arad, Tom Rothman, and Bryan Singer sat down. And from what I hear, it was Tom Rothman who said, “I think there’s a really good movie in here.” And they cut it down to 93 minutes or 98 minutes, whatever it is. They cut it to the bone, and then it balanced out. It felt like we had so many great character moments, but it was balanced out with the amount of action that we could afford.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about Rothman, because I think among fans, he’s perceived as sort of anti-superhero movie, and that he wanted to kill the X-Men franchise at one point. Is that a misconception?

Yeah. Tom Rothman is an extremely smart guy. He’s an extremely savvy film exec, I mean, one of the most successful that there ever was, and he was committed to the movie. You know when Wolverine pops the one claw and aims it at Cyclops like it’s the finger? The quote we got from one of the executives was, “I don’t think you understand how important the claw finger is to Tom Rothman.” So I would say, my personal experience of him, he was totally committed to it. 

At the same time, he’s trying to balance the needs of the studio and balance the budget. I think that he had a ton of ideas, and some of them went along with what Bryan was looking to do, and some of them didn’t. I would say that when Tom has a really smart director who’s willing to say, “Well, Tom, I love this idea, but that idea I think is going to hurt us,” he’s one of the best executives there ever was.

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Empyre: X-Men Bodes Well for the Future of Marvel’s Mutants

By Jim Dandy

I think if he’s got a weaker director who is afraid to stand up to him, they might get rolled over, steamrolled a bit. And just as the editing saved the movie, I think Bryan’s editing of Tom’s ideas produced a really unique combination of brilliance.

So yeah, I think Tom deserves a good amount of credit for creating the Fox X-Men. Whether he wanted to kill it down the road, I have no idea. I was gone after X2, but I certainly learned a lot working with Tom.

The film opens with a scene written by Christopher McQuarrie in which Magneto as a young boy is separated from his parents at Auschwitz — at the time a shocking way to open a comic book movie. Do you feel like that just set a whole different tone and reset the expectations for what this could be?

Absolutely. I mean, there wasn’t any question. Once I read the scene, once Bryan read the scene, there wasn’t any question that it was such a bold and amazing statement. And really, what I’ve always loved about Magneto is, to a great extent, Magneto is right. He’s saying to Charles, “They’re coming to kill us, and we have the power to stop them.”

So not only is it completely relatable, but when you see that Auschwitz scene, and you see his parents taken away, and the fact that he almost was able to stop it, it’s such a brilliant creation of that character. You just understand him for the rest of his existence.

I think for myself, I was like, “There is a coolness and reality in comic books that has not been tapped properly in any of them.” I mean, Richard Donner’s Superman was pretty true to the character, but Superman is very light and breezy. And Tim Burton’s Batman also created a Batman-like world, but at the same time, still, it was like tongue-in-cheek, and it was still weird. 

I was just trying to look at these people as real people. So we knew that that Auschwitz scene not only fit what we were trying to do, but elevated it beyond our hopes. 

I think there is a dual legacy to this movie. Number one, even though Blade sort of paved the way in 1998, X-Men definitely busted the doors open for the superhero genre. And the second legacy is the fact that you had these relevant and timely themes that still hold up today.

Yeah, sadly enough. But yeah, what Blade did was it showed that a non-Batman, non-Superman superhero movie could make $90 million, and it’s a brilliant, kick-ass, action film. Wesley Snipes is amazing. It just shows that you could make a comic book movie that worked. I think we had a little bigger budget. The X-Men were better known than Blade, and I think we did make it a little more real. 

You did work on X2. How much of what you wrote for X2 ended up in that movie, would you say?

A fair bit. I mean, I worked on it for a year, and then I handed it off in February, and they went up to shoot it in March. I wrote the opening Nightcrawler sequence. I mean, I’m not going to go through everything I didn’t write, but my draft was very strongly represented. 

At the same time, Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris came in to do on-set rewrites. And on a Bryan Singer film, you’re doing on-set rewrites constantly, so their voices are also quite prominent in the final draft. But I feel like as opposed to the first movie — first movie, I was trying to replicate Chris McQuarrie’s voice, which is more elevated than me, which is more literarily influenced. And the second movie was a little more my voice, a little more fun, a little more kick-ass, a little more diving into it with your hair on fire. And I think that, that shows.

So you were doing on-set rewrites on X-Men as well?

Yeah, for the first X-Men, I was there for everything. I’d be making up lines and whispering them to Bryan. He’d be telling the crew. I mean, it was insanity. Every day was another set of drafts. It was very cool, and I wish I could’ve done that for X2, but I was committed to shoot a pilot in Australia for Warner Brothers right after I handed in the draft. So unfortunately, I couldn’t be on set.

You wouldn’t have an MCU, I think, without that first X-Men movie.

That’s very kind of you to say. Like I say, it was lightning in a bottle. It was an empowered filmmaker, who wanted to make just a realistic-feeling superhero film, combined with a couple of young Marvel fans, X-Men fans, and teamed with a studio that was willing to take a risk. 

Will it be replicated? I mean, I would argue that the brilliance of Kevin Feige is that you have to be nigh on insane to say, “We’re going to build all this up to 27 movies and then create the Avengers movies.” To conceive of the fact that you’re going to make movies that huge, with those actors, at that level, is so gutsy and so insane, and yet, so much what the comic book fans wanted and were dying for. They wanted the movies to treat the comic books the way the comic books were written.

That means interaction, that means romance, that means scale, that means combos and team-ups and all this stuff. And Kevin was unafraid to do that. So I would say the next iteration of what we did on X-Men happened on The Avengers.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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