X-Men Film Series
As much as fans despise some of the later installments from both timelines in this series for multiple reasons, many forget that the first seeds of said reasons for hatred were first planted in the better received earlier installments.
- The first two X-Men films, while well-regarded at the time, featured a number of now-controversial trends that would carry on throughout not only their own franchise, but superhero movies of the 2000s in general, including its near-omnipresent black leather outfits (despite adapting a franchise and genre known for colorful costumes), sidelining potentially interesting characters in favor of a Spotlight-Stealing Squad (in this case consisting of Wolverine, Professor X and Magneto, with Mystique joining them in First Class and the films following it) and extensive deviations from the comics. These were tolerated at first, due to the novelty of seeing the X-Men on the big screen, and due to director Bryan Singer attempting to ground the films in reality to a degree and bring out the franchise's themes of prejudice and discrimination. However, following the superhero genre really taking off in the late 2000s, and especially with the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which marked a Genre Turning Point by, among other things, incorporating many quirky elements from the comics on the big screen, utilizing Unexpected Characters, and averting Movie Superheroes Wear Black), many fans started seeing the X-Men films as being almost ashamed of their comic book roots (revelations by James Marsden and Hugh Jackman that Singer had banned comic books from the film set not helping this perception), with their innovations (such as the use of lesser-known actors and creative action scenes with the characters' various superpowers) having been matched and exceeded by later films in the very genre that the films had helped popularize.
- The X-Men films were always criticized for their blatant overuse of Wolverine, but it didn't really start to get out of hand until X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which are universally cited as the low points of the series. In the first movie, despite having Rogue as an Audience Surrogate, most of the movie was still shown through Logan's eyes, and the big climax still amounted to the other heroes throwing Wolverine at Magneto's doomsday device and letting him fight Mystique and Sabretooth. In the second film, Jean and Nightcrawler both got notable arcs, but much of the plot was still dominated by Wolverine's efforts to get to the bottom of his past, with Cyclops and Professor Xavier spending most of the movie imprisoned in the Big Bad's fortress. However, most audiences were willing to forgive Wolverine's enlarged role because Hugh Jackman was still a new and exciting actor at the time. In the third film? Rogue vanishes after deciding to take the cure, Cyclops and Professor Xavier are killed off anticlimactically, there are extended scenes involving Wolverine taking on Magneto's army singlehandedly, and Jean barely seems to remember that she was in love with Scott years before she met Logan. By the time they cut out the middleman and gave Wolverine his own spinoff, they barely had anything interesting left to do with the character, and critics trashed the movie for forgetting to put in any memorable characters who weren't named "Logan". And even though Wolverine's appearance in X-Men: First Class was limited to a hilarious cameo, he returns with a vengeance in X-Men: Days of Future Past in a role that was originally Kitty Pryde's in the comics. Ultimately, he was reduced to a cameo appearance again by X-Men: Apocalypse, where the X-Men whom were captured by Stryker unleash him during their escape. That said, Wolverine's other solo films were better regarded by virtue of based on material that had yet to be done in the films, The Wolverine adapting stories where Wolverine goes to Japan (therefore allowing him to encounter Silver Samurai) and Logan being a chronological Grand Finale partially based on The Death of Wolverine that served as his swan song.
- Similarly, X2 and The Last Stand were both based on comic book storylines where Wolverine didn't play a huge role. It just wasn't as obvious in the former because God Loves, Man Kills is mostly an ensemble piece without a defined protagonist, whereas The Dark Phoenix Saga is very much Scott and Jean's story, making it very blatant that Logan was stealing a story that was never meant to be his.
- While X-Men: First Class is one of the more highly-regarded X-flicks, it has an original sin of its own: turning Mystique into a hero. This didn't detract from the film's quality per se, but it was a sign of the series' continuity starting to unravel. First Class reveals that Mystique was adopted by the Xaviers as a little girl and grew up as Charles' sister—which was never even remotely implied in the original trilogy, where Charles and Raven barely even interact. It was easy to forgive that, though, since Jennifer Lawrence's performance was one of the most praised parts of the film, and the ending mostly gels with the original trilogy by showing Mystique pulling a Face–Heel Turn and joining Magneto's Brotherhood, making it easy to accept the movie as a prequel. But both of the following movies—X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse—feature Mystique pulling more and more heroic feats until she becomes the field leader of the X-Men. While Mystique is the Big Bad of Days of Future Past, she's doesn't kill anyone and pulls a Heel–Face Turn. However, in Apocalypse she is an international hero who is idolized by the younger mutants, making her a completely different character from the Mystique that Rebecca Romijn played in the original trilogy. (It didn't help that Lawrence's performance seemed to get more disinterested with each film, as though she was only there for the money.) For some fans, it became hard to get emotionally invested in a series that ignored its own plot points so freely, which became noticeable in Dark Phoenix killing her off so she wouldn't be present by the time the original films rolled around.
- Much like with Wolverine, Magneto was criticized for his overexposure in the sequels albeit as a villain. Granted this started back with X-Men United in which, after helping the X-Men defeat Stryker, Magneto betrays them and turns Stryker's Cerebro on normal humans. Audiences were generally fine with it, since that film was only the second installment, and it served as a reminder that bigotry existed among both humans and mutants. However, Magneto's inclusion became less tolerable as later films keep finding new contrivances for him to stay as a villain at the expense of other bad guys. Last Stand has him a Big Bad again sharing villain duties with Phoenix Jean Grey, thereby robbing screen time that could've developed Jean's character and made her downfall all the more tragic. First Class, a Magneto origin story repurposed to become one for the X-Men as a whole, shows his rise to evil, although justified in the film still having his origins shown. Days of Future Past has young Magneto hijacking the Sentinels in an attempt to kill Bolivar Trask, forcing the other Big Bad, Mystique, to stop him. In Apocalypse, his new family is abruptly killed off so that he could become one of Apocalypse's horsemen. In Dark Phoenix, his new mutant commune is disrupted by a Phoenix Jean Grey, forcing him once again into conflict with Charles and the X-Men. Not only does Magneto's chronic villainy turn him into a screentime-robbing Karma Houdini, but his changing allegiance also makes the heroes seem idiotic for quickly forgiving and trusting him.
- Although Days of Future Past is still beloved by fans, it started the series' decade-hopping gimmick that would later derail its sequels. That said, the film at least used its '70s setting for good storytelling, as young Charles' cynicism mirrors America's post-Vietnam psyche and Trask wants to end the Cold War by uniting humanity against the common enemy of mutants. It also helps that the grizzled appearances and jaded personalities of young Charles and Magneto provide a sense of progression. However, when the sequels Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix continued to be period pieces, both were met with significant backlash for lacking a sense of continuity and squandering their settings. Although Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix are set in the '80s and '90s respectively, neither film used their period piece settings effectively for either world-building or characterization, usually limiting it to pop culture references like the former using arcade machines and having the heroes watch a Star Wars film. Furthermore, many fans were baffled by how the characters hardly seem to age, even with the out-of-universe justification that they reuse actors, as Moira in Apocalypse looks identical to her appearance in First Class twenty years ago, and Charles somehow looks even more boyish and youthful in Dark Phoenix than in Days of Future Past despite his history of alcoholism and drug abuse, ironic given that he lost his hair in Apocalypse. Rather than aid in storytelling or world-building, the continued decade-hopping gimmick only serves to distract and confuse audiences.
