By Jared Whitley
2015 is set to be a landmark year for the film industry, with bankable blockbusters scheduled for just about every franchise under the sun: Star Wars, Avengers, Terminator, Hunger Games, Superman/Batman, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and James Bond.
2014 is looking much thinner by contrast. The 2014 release currently grabbing the most buzz is X-Men: Days of Future Past, which debuted its first trailer last Tuesday:
Personally, I find myself caring much less about these mutants and far more about the mutants of a more reptilian kind, namely the perennially popular
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who also
have a movie coming out next summer. This is not to say that a Michael Bay-produced pop-corn movie will be better than DoFP (it just can’t be), but the core Ninja Turtle dynamic is so well crafted it can’t be screwed up – as opposed to the X-Men franchise which has sort of needed a reboot since 2006.
The sentiment is best summarized in this seminal 2011 Cracked video:
To sum up: the Ninja Turtles are so popular because they illustrate a proto-psychological theory suggesting four fundamental personality types. Many personality theories use this same breakdown:
| Humors | Phlegmatic | Melancholic | Choleric | Sanguine |
| Color Code | Yellow | White | Red | Blue |
| Keirsey | Artisan | Rational | Guardian | Idealist |
| Summary | Relaxed | Thoughtful | Ambitious | Emotional |
| Like this: | |
| Turtle | Mike | Don | Leo | Raph |
| Summary | Party dude | Does machines | Leads | Cool, but rude |
It’ll be a little while till we get to the X-Men. Here’s some White Queen cosplay to tide you over. Now with virtually any famous foursome you’d care to name, you can make this same breakdown. You can do it for hero groups:
| Fantastic Four | Human Torch | Invisible Woman | Mr. Fantastic | Thing |
| Avengers | Iron Man | Thor | Captain America | Hulk |
| The Incredibles | Dash | Violet | Elastigirl | Mr. Incredible |
| Ghostbusters | Peter | Winston | Egon | Ray |
| Or TV shows: |
| The Office | Jim | Pam | Michael | Dwight |
| South Park | Butters/Kenny | Stan | Kyle | Cartman |
| Simpsons | Bart | Marge | Lisa | Homer |
| Sex and the City | Miranda | Carrie | Charlotte | Samantha |
|
| Or even music: |
| Beatles | Ringo | George | Paul | John |
| ABBA | Frida | Agnetha | Benny | Bjorn |
| KISS | Ace Frehley | Peter Criss | Paul Stanley | Gene Simmons |
Sidebar: The four Hogwarts houses do not correspond to this model as well as I would like. If JK had said that Hufflepuff was the house for artists, then it would slot in well with the other three alongside Slytherin (ambition/leader), Gryffindor (courage/emotional), and Ravenclaw (intelligence/thoughtful). Instead Hufflepuff is just “other.”
Here’s an X-Men: First Class picture if they went to Hogwarts. We’re almost there. Now at the mention of Hogwarts, we have to point out that not every team is a foursome. There are famous threesomes, which tend to correspond to the
Freudian triad:
The
id is the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the
super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the
ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop you from doing certain things that your id may want you to do.”
| Archetype | Ego | Super Ego | Id |
| Harry Potter | Harry | Hermione | Ron |
| LotR | Samwise | Frodo | Gollum |
| Star Wars | Luke | Leia | Han |
| Star Trek | Kirk | Spock | McCoy |
But restricting one’s self to a threesome for a team isn’t as dynamic as a foursome; you’ll note that all these threesomes also have large supporting casts. Even the most famous threesome ever, the Three Musketeers, is technically a foursome.
| Musketeers | Porthos | Athos | Aramis | D’Artagnan |
The fault, dear Wolverine… OKAY so now clever readers will notice that this article about the X-Men has, thus far, said almost nothing about the X-Men film franchise. That’s because, unlike the well-designed foursomes you see above, most representations of the X-team in other media look like this:
| X-Men | Wolverine | Wolverine | Wolverine | Wolverine |
And this just isn’t very interesting. While Hugh Jackman is a capable leading man,
Wolverine is not the main character of the X-Men. There is no main character: they are a team. And Wolverine isn’t their leader. He’s
the Lancer, the team member who is more interesting than the leader because he doesn’t have to be the leader (like Han Solo). This is so intrinsic to the character’s popularity that he’s the intro to the TV Trope about
The Lancer.
X-film franchise’s greatest asset is also its greatest stumbling block: Wolverine. He’s not supposed to be the main character – so much so that in both X1 and X2 Magneto mocks Wolvie for thinking everything’s about him!
It isn’t. Because this is how the X-Men is supposed to look:
| TMNT | Mike | Don | Leo | Raph |
| X-Men | * | * | Cyclops | Wolverine |
You can substitute different mutants as Mikes (Nightcrawler, Gambit, Iceman, Jubilee) or as Dons (Rogue, Colossus, Shadowcat, Beast) – but the Leonardo HAS to be Cyclops and the Raphael HAS to be Wolverine. There are others who could fill those roles (though Storm can be a decent Leonardo), but the team is at its best when Cyclops and Wolverine are performing these roles. The dynamic between the two has been the emotional core of the franchise since
1975, both as they work together and occasionally come into conflict – a conflict which incidentally has very little to do Jean Grey, although this has been dramatically overblown in the film franchise.
Note that I didn’t include Jean Grey in the previous paragraph about mutant personality. This is because, of course, she hasn’t got one. She doesn’t even have a super-hero name. Does she show up to the battle and say, “Here’s my business card: I’m Jean Grey”?
Conclusion In this world of endless reboots and re-imaginings, I admire the folks at Fox for sticking to a franchise that will be 14 years old when DoFP comes out next year. Since falling off the rails after X2, the X-films have not demonstrated any kind of real formula or plan, certainly not on the scale of the
Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it would be difficult to establish any such a plan with so much backstory, much of it self-contradictory. But adopting a team-based structure like Nina Turtles would be a significant improvement for how the movies feel and demonstrating what made the X-Men so popular to begin with.
And not this. Never, ever this. Please. Now of course not every group has to be a perfect foursome like the litany of examples above. (Ocean’s 11, for example, seems to work pretty well with 11 Michelangelos.) But if you’re making a movie about super-heroes who shoot ice and lasers at giant robots, it’s probably a good idea to stick with a formula that works so well.
Good luck with your future days, X-franchise. And cowabunga, dude!