Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Raf Loves, Fox Kills (My X-Men Pitch)

So what do I want The X-Men to be like in the MCU. Well, the short version is...not so short.
This is "X-Men: Mankind".
So first and foremost: Russo Bros directing and Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (both Deadpool movies) writing it. Your story basis is "X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills" with some alterations. Do the costumes from the comics in a sensible modern style. And don't make mutants this new thing. Mutants have been around in the MCU for a few decades, but because all these films focus on superheroes and space and magic and stuff we've never heard of the mutant dilemma until now. The Xavier School for The Gifted is a training institution children can go to every day after school or live there to help hone their mutant powers. Their teachers are The X-Men, a covert-ops team of trained mutants who only get involved when it's mutant-related. Some mutants like Jean wish they could have helped during Loki or Ultron, but Scott understands their limits and acknowledges the world wasn't ready for something as personal as mutants being heroes. And play up the mutants being like homosexuals or minorities thing. Have racist background characters. This is the MCU we can handle that by this point.
Oh, and the the team. You essentially get two types of characters: Main characters and background characters. The main characters move the plot and the background characters only come into play during the end. Cyclops, Marvel Girl (gotta call Jean something), Beast (already furry), Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Professor X are main characters. Background characters are Wolverine (lazy gym teacher throughout the film until the end when he suits up like a badass), Iceman, Banshee, Angel, and Forge. Forge is there because someone has to build the Blackbird. Thunderbird is the team's only dead member and Sunfire quit early on. Magneto is in the film of course and his Brotherhood of Mutants consists of Mystique, The Blob, Toad, Pyro, Havok (who doesn't remember Scott Summers is his brother because he was very young when they were separated) and Polaris (Magneto's daughter, don't care if Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are retconned to be his kids). Magneto acts like Malcolm X to Xavier's MLK Jr., Magneto's way of asserting mutants as the dominant race is terrorizing anti-mutant rallies and pushing a senator around after a press conference. Magneto wants to scare people and that gives mutants a bad name. A parallel to someone from a nationality, sex, or gender doing something awful having a negative effect on everyone who shares that nationality, sex, or gender.
The other threat is Reverend William Stryker. He's a Religious Fundamentalist, a TV televangelist, and he hates mutants. He appears to just be a bad influence on people, telling them to hate and fear mutants. This brings about a group of mutant-haters called The Purifiers, and makes Stryker an allegory for politic and social figures who's own personal beliefs corrupt people. Stryker's followers abduct Professor X and use technology to manipulate his psychic powers, effectively giving Stryker a map of all mutants in the country. Pulling his strings with the government, Stryker gets his hands on a Sentinel prototype and programs the mutant GPS into it. And yes, it's big and purple.
So while the initial threat is Magneto and his group attacking people and The X-Men have to defend people who may not approve of them, the true threat is this giant robot The X-Men have to battle while some other X-Men save The Professor. The climax is a few X-Men confronting Stryker on stage of one of his televised sermons. You get the "you dare call that human" line from Stryker against Nightcrawler. Jean says "he's more human than you" and Strkyer goes to shoot her and a human cop kills him instead, thus portraying the life of a human is more important than the classification of a human.
Cyclops makes some big speech about not hiding anymore (make Cyclops as good as Cap and you'll do everyone a favor) and The X-Men are more publicly recognized. Mutant racism isn't solved and Magneto still gets away, but it's a step in the right direction. This leads to Wolverine movies and a New Mutants TV show and more.
Hope you enjoyed my first X-Men Pitch. I'm going to be approaching these a little differently. Thanks for reading!

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