I find it rather striking that audiences were willing to embrace the new Superman movie, Man of Steel despite the stench left by Superman Returns, and the scathing reviews that gave audiences advance warning that this movie was nowhere near as cerebral as Nolan's critically-lauded Batman movies were, but I guess it just goes to show that all people really wanted was a nicely action-packed, if somewhat flawed Superman movie. The bottom line is that they got over SR pretty easily.
What I can't help but wonder, though, is whether or not they will forgive SR director Bryan Singer quite as easily when his first X-Men film since 2003, X-Men: Days of Future Past, hits cinemas sometime next year.
To me it feels like only yesterday that Singer was regarded as a demigod by fans of both comic books and comic-book-based movies. X2: X-Men United was a bona fide box-office hit and his stock was basically soaring, so much so that Warner Brothers was ready to lure him away from Twentieth Century Fox with a production budget north of $200 million and carte blanche to make the Superman movie he had always dreamed of making. Unfortunately, that happened to be Superman Returns. Since then Singer's directed two feature films, the offbeat Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as a Nazi who took part in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, and the recent Jack the Giant Slayer, neither of which was particularly well-received at the box office.
Singer is currently busy directing X-Men: Days of Future Past, and personally I am more than happy to welcome him back into the fold. I was a little surprised, however, to discover that not exactly everyone felt the same way; message boards were suddenly full of venom for Singer, and amazingly, films like X-Men and X2 had become retroactively terrible in many fanboys' eyes.
Now, it's always advisable to take internet posters' comments with a grain of salt; after all, if all of them were to believed, Man of Steel would have made a billion dollars by now and Iron Man 3 would have tanked at the box-office. The next X-Men movie will succeed or fail regardless of what a handful of internet fanboys think. But their comments, coupled with the lukewarm if not utterly poor showing of Singer's latest directorial efforts at the box office have given me pause, and I cannot help but ask; do people hate Superman Returns so much that it has retroactively erased every ounce of Singer's goodwill generated by his two X-Men movies? It feels unfair, especially considering that it was the first one that arguably began the Marvel Age of movies in earnest back in 2000. Even M. Night Shyamalan got more "second chances" from audiences than he arguably deserved, considering that the last commercially successful movie he made was 2004's The Village.
I, for one, believe that X-Men: Days of Future Past has a more than even chance of being a good, even great movie, even with a script by Simon Kinberg, a man of whose work I am not a fan.
Maybe it's not about Superman Returns; maybe X-men/Marvel fans are still bitter about Singer's having left the franchise for rival DC, and yet fans of Marvel Comics have regularly welcomed back writers and artists who would do stints, sometimes lasting years, over at Marvel's Distinguished Competition. I'm loath to think that this disdain over one creative misfire has anything to do with Singer's openly professed sexuality; I like to believe comic book fans on the whole are more evolved than that, even though many of them have proven me wrong time and again.
Well, whatever the reason some fans are not keen on seeing Singer back in the X-director's chair, I am more than happy to see the return of the guy responsible for bringing the X-men to the big screen. Welcome back Bryan!
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