I'm 95, I'm not dead!
X-Men 1 came out in--what--2000? A thousand years ago in the Internet Age.
Before it, there was really only Blade if one desired an "adult" take on the genre.
And while X1 may seem naive and dated today, it was paving new ground on untested terrain and had a tiny budget.
Singer's talent made it as good as it was. I think X2 was the most solid of the original trilogy, in terms of delivering a good movie that adapted the comic stories well.
X3 was like Spider-Man 3 in that the dreaded "studio notes" syndrome had taken over.
This happens all the time: a visionary director shepherds an iffy property to the box office. It's a financial and critical success. Then the talentless studio hacks swarm in like the vampire squid they are and wipe their greasy feces all over the franchise.
Failure is an orphan, and victory has a thousand fathers.
First Class and DOFP were both pretty good but the plotlines/timelines had become so convoluted and the ever-expanding cast so poorly developed that their weaknesses keep them from being either great adaptations of the books or logical extensions of the franchise.
The definitive X-Men film has yet to be made, IMO.
Fox was making it up as they went along (like trailblazers must). Feige and the MCU had the luxury, foresight, and skill to think about their world-building and develop a blueprint. Building an interconnected cinematic universe had never been done from the ground up before (only retroactively).
Warner Bros/DC is now attempting to copy that blueprint, and I don't think they have a clue how to pull it off.
Your mileage may vary . . .
So true. The FF's rogue's gallery is one of the best in the biz and Doom is the apex.
Kirby & Lee struck a creative mother-lode that is still being mined a half century later.
They were mining gold. Fox kept digging and hit a sewer line . . .
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