How the X-Men movies could have lived up to their full potential (part 1 of 2)

The first two X-Men movies – X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) – are really good movies in their own right. They may not be the most faithful adaptations of the comics, but I think it's a strength that they focus in on the more grounded stuff – and so I'm going to leave them unchanged, and use them as a starting point. The way I've organised things, there's a new X-Men movie almost every year – the only exceptions are 2008 (when there are none) and 2017 (when there are two).

X-Men 3: Dark Phoenix (2006) is based on the ideas which the first two movies' filmmakers had: Jean resurrects as the Phoenix; Magneto gets Emma Frost (a contemporary of him and Charles, played by Sigourney Weaver) to manipulate Jean's mind; Cyclops steps up as team leader, and by the end of the movie has got on good terms with Wolverine; Gambit starts as a member of the Brotherhood but defects to the X-Men after bonding with Rogue; things culminate in an attack on the White House; Cyclops is forced to kill Jean's physical body but she ascends to the heavens as a cosmic being. There are a few things I would add:

• Storm isn't here. The explanation is that Nightcrawler went travelling to go find himself, and she went with him.

• Beast is here, though, and Colossus also has an expanded role.

• Rogue and Iceman break up, freeing her to strike up a romance with Gambit and him with Shadowcat.

• Jean restores Wolverine's memories, against his will.

• The end of the movie has the X-Men publicly acknowledged as heroic mutants for the first time, in recognition for saving the President.

• This is not intended to be the last movie. It ends in a way that could conclude a reasonably satisfying trilogy, but doesn't actively try to end the series like The Last Stand did.

Wolverine (2007) is a prequel which makes every effort to match seamlessly with everything we saw and heard about Wolverine's origin in the previous X-Men movies. Most of the movie is based around Wolverine working for Team X under William Stryker, about 15 years before the events of the first film (we're not establishing a time period, since the main movies are supposed to be in "the not too distant future"). Liev Schreiber's character is not Sabretooth: he's Logan's brother from the comics, Dog. Wade Wilson can also be a member of Team X but he does not become Deadpool in this movie: he's just Wade Wilson. Wolverine gets his adamantium skeleton at the end of the movie, not in the middle: he's got Dog killed by his own actions, and he's thoroughly disillusioned with everything Stryker is doing – but he just wants to be numb, not remember anything and not feel anything, so he accepts being turned into a mindless machine... except at the end he breaks out from Alkali Lake out of pure survival instinct. Set up at the very end of the movie that he's stowed away on a ship and ended up in Japan.

X-Men: The End (2009) is the grand finale to the main X-Men movies – after this we're branching out more into spinoffs, prequels, etc. The main focus for the whole movie is the "mutant cure". Since Wolverine has his own ongoing spinoff films, he doesn't have to take too much focus and can just be one of the ensemble. Cyclops continues to stand out as team leader; Storm is back with a mohawk and with Forge in tow; Angel also gets introduced as a kid; Rogue, Iceman, Shadowcat and Colossus are fully-fledged adult X-Men now. Charles Xavier is revealed to the public as a mutant, and is then assassinated. Magneto is de-powered at the end, but Mystique is not: we're keeping her around for the future. Rogue still chooses to take the cure at the end. At the end of the movie, with Charles dead and Rogue no longer needing looking after, Wolverine leaves the X-Men again and rides off into the night.

Wolverine II (2010) is a direct follow-up to his first solo movie: featuring newly-amnesiac Logan in Japan in a story heavily influenced by the Claremont-Miller comic miniseries. It has a somewhat upbeat ending, with Logan claiming the Wolverine identity as something positive, and the suggestion he and Mariko Yashida have a future together. (As his next solo movie will show, they don't.)

Magneto (2011) is a prequel set in the late 1950s (with flashbacks to World War 2 of course). It stars Erik Lenscherr as a young man hunting down Nazis, including Baron von Strucker and the Fenris twins. 17-year-old Charles Xavier (already bald) is a supporting character.

So, with a new movie every year, and 2012 also being packed with The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man, what should the X-Men movies do? Counter-programming! Deadpool (2012) is a smaller-scale R-rated action comedy. It’s set in the present day, more-or-less in-continuity with the other movies (with Deadpool here being the same guy who was in Wolverine), but perhaps hinting that it’s set in a world where the previous X-Men movies are fictionalised retellings of real events.

Wolverine III (2013) – which naturally uses Wolverine's three claws to represent the "III" on the poster – is not a prequel, but is set after the events of X-Men: The End. The previous two movies did "Wolverine in black ops" and "Wolverine in Japan" respectively, and now this one does "Wolverine in Madripoor" – one of the antagonists is Wolverine’s twenty-year-old son Akihiro a.k.a. Daken. In this continuity Daken's mother is Mariko Yashida, who's dead now, and his master – who is the main villain of the story – is Ogun (here depicted as a powerful telepathic mutant rather than as anything mystical); Ogun is allied with Viper, the ruler of Madripoor. Jubilee is also a main character, being an orphaned mutant teenage girl whom Wolverine becomes mentor to; so is Psylocke (real name not revealed), a telepath with ninja skills allied to Wolverine. The movie ends with Ogun dead and Viper overthrown, Daken’s brainwashing broken but with him staying in Madripoor and the strong suggestion that he will rise to fill the power vacuum as its leader, and Wolverine and Jubilee going off into the sunset as surrogate father and daughter.

X-Men: The Beginning (2014) is an origin story for the X-Men team and the Xavier School, also set about fifteen years before the first film, with Charles Xavier as its protagonist. New actors will need to be cast to play Charles and Erik, although the actors from the Magneto movie can cameo in flashbacks I suppose. New actors are also cast as teenage versions of Storm, Cyclops, Jean Grey and Beast, as well as Cyclops’s younger brother Havok and Magneto’s children Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. We are introduced to Storm as an orphan thief on the streets of Cairo, and we see Xavier’s confrontation with the Shadow King; we also see Cyclops & Havok’s origin, with the plane crash where they lost their parents. Banshee also appears as an instructor at the early Xavier School. The major antagonists for the movie are Bolivar Trask, the Sentinels and the Master Mold. The Hellfire Club also appear as secondary antagonists, or more like wild cards: the younger Emma Frost is Xavier’s love interest in a Batman/Catwoman sort of way, while Sebastian Shaw financed the Sentinels. The split between Charles and Erik happens at the end of the movie, with Erik taking his kids with him.

This post is getting long, so it'll be split into two parts. But I've got plans for movies and also television all the way up to 2019 when 20th Century Fox got bought out.

ETA: Part 2 here.