A History of "X-Men" Filmmakers Blaming One Another for Their Bad Superhero Films

With a bit of Fantastic Four tea spilled for good measure.

The release of X-Men: Dark Phoenix hopefully marks the end of an era: the era of bad X-Men movies.

Dark Phoenix opened to the worst reviews of the franchise, and the saga’s worst ever box office debut. As if that wasn’t already an ignominious finale to a once-fabled franchise, longtime X-Men producer Lauren Shuler Donner took to Twitter to tell fans not to blame her for its failures.

In a now deleted tweet, Shuler Donner insisted everyone "save your condolences", reiterating that she had "zero" to do with Dark Phoenix, its predecessor Apocalypse, or the forever-upcoming New Mutants. (That’s something of a thrown elbow at the beleaguered, perpetually-being-reshot New Mutants. Please, just let it die.)

No matter what she tweets, Shuler Donner is credited as a producer on all those films, and pretty much every other X-movie released since the year 2000. But such a declaration is par for the course at Fox, where filmmakers are always trying to avoid taking the credit/blame for their Marvel movies.

In 2015, director Josh Trank similarly did the ol’ tweet-and-delete by revealing the version of Fantastic Four coming to cinemas was far from his intended vision. He did so the night before release. What was likely intended as insulation from a godawful movie actually hurt his career; the dude’s been in director jail ever since, with his next flick (starring Tom Hardy) still awaiting release.

But back to the incredibly salty X-Men universe. Let’s go in reverse chronological order, beginning with writer-producer Simon Kinberg and series editor/composer John Ottman helping finish X-Men: Apocalypse. According to Deadline, its credited director, Bryan Singer, would "reportedly go AWOL from the set”", so Kinberg and Ottman had to step in to complete his job. Understandably, they let Singer keep the directorial credit (the film was similarly savaged by critics).

Going back further, we have X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn explaining why he didn’t want to direct its follow-up, Days of Future Past. He recently told Collider that he warned Fox they were rushing the storytelling, explaining that Apocalypse or a Wolverine reboot should have come first. "That’s one of the reasons I didn’t continue, because they didn’t listen to me," he added.

Almost a decade earlier, he explained that he would have made a film "a hundred times better" than Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Ratner, meanwhile, has largely defended his widely-derided film, though back in 2009, while arguing against the haters, he made a point of saying, "It's out of the filmmaker's hands. A film is a collaborative effort. How's a person sitting at home going to worry about how a movie is going to turn out to be?" That kinda suggests he, at the very least, wanted to share the hate around.

For what it’s worth, one filmmaker does want the credit for his terrible X-Men movie. That’d be Gavin Hood, helmer of the ill-fated X-Men: Origins—Wolverine. Back in the late 2000s, there were rumours that Lauren Shuler Donner’s husband, Richard Donner, had taken over as director on the flick's Sydney set. But Hood insists Donner was just helping out as a producer. Speaking of the many shooting problems he faced, Hood told Den of Geek he once told Donner, "'Richard, these are my problems, mate.'"

"So he came out for a bit and he was very helpful, and I consider him someone that was a good mentor to me at that time," Hood added.

Years later, Hood continued to take the fall, telling Indiewire, "I own the mistakes I made."

However, he also said, "I’m very grateful because I managed to buy a house off that film." 

One of the picture's stars, Ryan Reynolds, has made no secret of his distaste of that movie, and the way it mangled the introduction of his beloved Deadpool. So much so, at the end of Deadpool 2, Deadpool goes back in time to actually murder the previous iteration of himself.

Now that Disney has purchased Fox Studios, they can integrate some of the remaining Marvel characters that were previously excluded from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (for complicated and boring rights reasons), including the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

Until those reboots come, let us bid farewell to this incredibly catty and largely disastrous period of moviemaking. Excelsior?

Header Image: Fox