Bryan Singer’s upcoming “X-Men Days Of Future Past” can likely be seen in two different ways: either you’re anticipating the hell out of this movie with its ultimate X-Men fanboy-driven cast of characters or you’re generally worried that a movie with over 25 super heroes and villains is going to be one big disaster.
If you’re in either camp, Empire’s new glut of 25 character posters will make its point for you. Yep, 25 different magazine covers for 25 different characters (well 23, since Bryan Singer gets his own cover, as does Anna Paquin‘s Rogue though she’s been cut from the film). But really, was this all necessary? Is the Toad one going to be a collector’s item 10 years from now? This emblematic of the culture of overkill marketing, and it makes us wonder if we’re just days away from of character posters seeing 25 different posters for the movie too. Look, we’re glad Bryan Singer is back in the ‘X-Men’ fold, but this all just feels like a bit much and a recipe for disaster—that is unless the movie is really, “X-Men: Days Of Lots Of Super Hero Cameos.”
‘Days Of Future Past’ features an ambitious narrative where the X-Men of a dystopian near future travel back into the 1970s to convince the younger version of themselves to cut off a threat that destroys humanity some forty years later (actually, it’s just Wolverine who goes into the past, at least in the beginning, facing off against the cast of “X-Men: First Class”). Hell, it could work, but it feels like the studio trend of just blockbusterizing their blockbusters a la “The Avengers.” If audiences respond we’ll see much much more of this, plus the serialization of stories that are no longer self-contained, but simply the first installment of many episodes. Personally, that’s not what we want to see on the screen, but let’s just take it movie by movie and judge ‘Days Of Future Past’ on its own merits.
