Look...
I'm positive that I'm going to disagree with Harry... I think I'm going to love this movie.
But let's not sugar coat it; the Phoenix Saga has been royally ****ed in the ass, and they didn't even give it the respect to call the next morning.
Cyclops is killed off. Wolverine is who kills her. The entire essence of the Phoenix Saga is thrown out the window 45 seconds into it.
I still think I'm going to love this movie for the cure story arc, Beast, Magneto, and everything else.
But the Phoenix Saga has been royally ****ed by Kinberg and Penn. I don't blame studio politics. Why?
May 26th is an obvious good release date. It's Memorial Day weekend. Plus, there's no heavy competition around it. It's a perfect date, of course they want to keep it. They wanna make money. Memorial Day weekend makes money. I don't view it as a "beat Singer to the box office" move.
I am also unwilling to believe that Fox's parameters were "kill off Cyclops and don't let him have a role in this film", while meanwhile, they are marketing the **** out of the character. I think the parameters were "James Marsden is filming Superman Returns, so he'll have a limited availability that you have to work around"
I think Kinberg and Penn were too uncreative to find a use for Cyclops, and just took the easy way out by killing him off not a half hour into the movie.
If they were as big of fans as they claimed to be, they'd at least make his death meaningful... it's obviously not what sets her over the edge, as she seems over the edge already when she does it, and goes all Dark Phoenix on Wolverine before he tells her what she did. He's not mentioned at all afterwords, yet Xavier, who's revealed in this film to have been a manipulator in his past, his goodbye gets a grand exit, with a big funeral event. Oh, and a resurrection after the credits.
But no, Cyclops goes out with a wimper, like a fart in the wind, never to be mentioned again, so that Wolverine can save the Phoenix. It's the one thing we ALL complained about from that original script AICN reviewed. They knew it, as shown through all of their responses to that older script. Yet they still had the audacity to sit there on the xverse, and straight up tell us they think we'll be proud of Cyclops in this film, and that they were proud of what they did with him. And then all of a sudden, when they get called on it "Oh, we did the best we could with the parameters we had"
Bull ****ing ****. That's the most disrespectful thing they could have done to us, was not change the one thing we were the most concerned about, and then tell us to our faces that things have changed, Cyclops has a few surprises, and that we'll be happy with his treatment. And it's why I find myself losing a lot of respect for the 2 of them.
Harry has some VERY legitamate concerns with this film. I don't care if he has been blindly bashing it this entire time. They ****ed up the most beloved story arc in the source material. And to an extent, they've ****ed up not only what is an otherwise great movie, but what is otherwise an amazing trilogy as a whole, because of their ignorance.
And they claim to be such huge fans, and such great allies for us.
Anyone with any level of fandom for the X-Men wouldn't have killed Cyclops off, in the Phoenix Saga of all storylines. EVERYONE that I've talked to about this has said the same thing, that killing off Cyclops is ****ing ******ed. Even my mom, who doesn't know much more about the X-Men than the movies and some cartoons, thought it was ridiculous to kill off Cyclops.