Hugh Jackman On X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

While promoting his new movie, Prisoners, at TIFF, actor Hugh Jackman spoke with Access Hollywood about the X-Men franchise and about X-Men: Days of Future Past. Said Jackman, "I keep saying it's like two movies in one but the size of it, it's like three in one! [It's] going to blow people away because the story - Bryan Singer is going to be the first director to make increasingly better movies in a franchise, I'm not sure if there's anyone else that's done it."

On the larger impact of the X-Men franchise Jackman stated, "Few people credit Bryan for what he deserves credit for, which is really inventing that genre. There wasn't really a superhero genre before X-Men came out. Funny enough, I remember catching a plane while we were promoting The Prestige with Chris Nolan [who] said to me that he'd always had the Batman in his mind. Even way back before 2000, he had the version of Batman that he ended up making in his head. He said, 'when I went into the cinema and saw X-Men, I said damn, that's my idea.' The idea that you could really dive in to the emotional life, to the vulnerability of these characters and that, as well as being fantastical, amazing and action, is what's going to hook people and make them care. That's what Bryan did, he had a lot of courage to do that." I'd probably argue here that Blade truly kicked things off in 1998 and that Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man is the one that made Hollywood executives stand up and pay attention but a serious case can also be made for Singer's X-Men. Remember, Singer directed the first film and X-2 but didn't helm the disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand, which truly owes its box office success to Singer's first two films.