Just caught this at Aint It cool news... Spoiler warning for Xmen 3...
AICN EXCLUSIVE! X3 Script Review! Plus An Open Letter To Tom Rothman And Fox Stockholders!!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Okay, I know, I know. I’m late with this. But you can thank Earthlink for that. Nine days without service of any kind. Amazing. I was starting to think that Avi Arad and Fox had paid Earthlink to crash my service.
Now, before we begin, let’s clarify a few things. Harry and I have not read the X-MEN 3 script, any version of it. We’ve got a new spy who has, though, and I’ve been able to verify that the version of the script he read was the “six-day-draft” that Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn wrote under the supervision of Matthew Vaughn. I like both Kinberg and Penn as writers, and I know that both of them are genuinely going to try to do right by the characters. However, this isn’t a case of two writers doing whatever they want. If it were, I don’t think there’d be anything to worry about.
You want to know who the main villain of X3 is going to be? Tom Rothman.
One of the reasons I started reading AICN, before I ever contributed anything to it, was because it demystified the development process. So often, blame (or credit) is assigned by fans to people for no particular reason. It’s easy to point a finger at a director or at a writer or even at a company like Marvel and assume that they were responsible for something, but having gone through the development process several times now for different studios (including Fox), I can tell you that more often than not, the truly terrible decisions can come from people whose names you never see onscreen.
When I call Rothman a villain, I’m well aware of how loaded that word is. I can’t think of anything more shocking this year, though, than the speech he gave at this year’s Saturn Awards. Here’s a show specifically designed to celebrate genre, a room filled with SF, fantasy, and horror filmmakers, and Tom Rothman gets up and not only lambasts everyone who writes about those genres, but also has the nerve to call himself a geek.
You, sir, are no geek. A geek would not have stripmined the ALIEN and PREDATOR franchises the way you did. A geek would not consistently value release dates and fiscal quarters over getting material right. Listening to him talk about what a friend he is to genre filmmakers was akin to being at a Shoah Foundation dinner where the guest of honor was Joseph Goebbels. This is the guy who chased Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin off an ID4 sequel after they made $600 million for the studio because he wanted to pay them half of what they made on the first film. This is the man who browbeat Stephen Norrington until he quit the business altogether. This is the guy who almost convinced Alex Proyas to give up filmmaking. How many genre filmmakers... great genre filmmakers... do you see returning to Fox over and over to make their films? And why, exactly, do you think that is?
By the way, Rothman... telling a ballroom full of people that you’re a geek because you f*ck the star of SUSPIRIA and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE every night? Classy. Very, very classy. But still... not the point.
If you’re a Fox stockholder, now is the time to be concerned. X-MEN is the only proven major franchise that Fox currently has up and running. Who knows if FANTASTIC FOUR is going to work or not? Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it won’t. ALIEN VS PREDATOR marked the end of two franchises at the same time. STAR WARS was never yours in the first place. Studios depend on these types of films. There’s a reason they’re called tentpoles. This is what you build the entire rest of your release year around. If you manage one of these properties the right way, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Look at the way Sony has handled SPIDER-MAN so far. As soon as they release one, they start developing the next one, giving them plenty of time to get the script just right. They don’t start shooting until this winter, but they’re already doing FX and costume tests, and they’re deep into the writing process based on an outline that Sam Raimi and his brother have been tweaking since last year.
You know when Rothman finally gave the go-ahead to start putting together the treatment for X-MEN 3? This February. I’m a chronic procrastinator, and even I think that’s piss-poor time management, man.
Here’s the thing about X-MEN. It may be one of the most flexible and durable film franchises I’ve ever seen. By the very nature of who the X-Men are, you can rotate cast in and out of the series without having to scrap continuity. This is already off to a better financial and creative start than the Bond franchise was, and you see the legs on that one. Why, then, would you allow a personal grudge to lead you to make decisions that will not only kill the golden goose, but also rape it and eat it?
And make no mistake... the rush to make that Memorial Day 2006 release date is about beating Bryan Singer to the screen. The acrimony involved in the Singer/Fox break-up is rich enough to write an entire book about, especially if it leads to the destruction of the franchise. This could turn into one of the all-time great displays of executive hubris in Hollywood. You want to know why you lost Singer to Warner Bros. and SUPERMAN in the first place? Because you took over a year to negotiate his deal to direct X-MEN 3. That should have been one of the biggest no-brainer decisions you could have ever made, but maybe you have to have a brain to make a no-brainer decision. You strung him along and strung him along and strung him along, and then when you had finally proven to him that you weren’t going to make things easy... you were too late. Alan Horn took full advantage of Bryan’s almost-fetishistic love of Donner’s SUPERMAN and your hesitancy, and he stole him from you. I don’t know what’s funnier... throwing Bryan off the lot using security guards, or the fact that you had to let him back on the lot immediately thereafter so he could shoot HOUSE for the studio.
What’s really amazing is how X-MEN was something Rothman hated from the start, no matter what he says now in public. I’ve spoken to at least ten people close to the production who have provided me with laundry lists of the ways that Rothman tried to f*ck up the first film. Remember when they cut the budget and moved up the release date on the first X-MEN? You know why? Rothman was cutting his losses. He really, truly anticipated that the film would come out and vanish without a trace, and he would finally be rid of what he saw as a corporate albatross. Instead, the film clicked, and on the second film, Bryan Singer and his writers and the producers were all able to muster enough muscle to get Fox to give them the room they needed to make something even better.
That must have stuck in Rothman’s craw something fierce, and that’s what led to that massive slow-down after X-MEN 2. They should have made Bryan’s deal the following week, and they should have also locked in Dougherty and Harris and Tom DeSanto and Lauren Shuler-Donner and Ralph Winter and the entire production team and the cast and everyone else that was part of the creative alchemy that made the first two films work. I remember one year at BNAT when Tom DeSanto talked about the way they had been planting the seeds of the Dark Phoenix storyline and several others since the very first scenes of the first X-MEN. Who knows? Maybe someday Marvel will let DeSanto and Singer do a graphic novel or a limited-run series where they do the story they had in mind for X3 and X4 on the comics page so we can at least see where the films were originally headed. As it is, Rothman’s firmly back in charge of the franchise now, and that distaste for the material seems to be seeping back in.
Which is not to say that all the news is bad.
When I was first contacted by The Big Hurt, our new spy, I almost dismissed the review he sent us. Too much detail is almost always the giveaway for someone trying to troll you. But I was able to verify this with multiple sources all the way up the chain of command at Fox and Marvel, and I can tell you... even though some of the details of the script are still being hammered out, the spine of what you’re going to see onscreen next summer is right here. Harry seems to have implied in some of what he’s written that he feels this is an unmitigated disaster. I’m not so sure yet. I do know that there are some valid complaints here, particularly regarding the way the main menace of the film is almost a carbon-copy of the menace from the last film. Also, one of Rothman’s chuckle-headed notions that he kept trying to shoehorn into the first film, the idea of Storm and Wolverine having a steamy sexual relationship, has resurfaced now. Gee, I wonder why. But there’s stuff here that I like, and it sounds like there are some amazing sequences in store. Keep in mind also that what our spy read was rough, so even if the substance of a scene was right in the draft he read, the way it’s actually handled may be very different in the final version. Dialogue, the description of certain effects, the way an action scene is fleshed out... it’s still early days yet. And even with all those caveats, this is mostly a positive review.
I’ve really wrestled with how much to reveal of the spoilers, too. In the end, I hope we’ve erred on the side of caution, but I want to give you a sense of exactly why Avi Arad calls this “the most controversial film of the series.”
Next summer, Fox is cleaning house, and there are going to be a lot of bodies on the bonfire. Check this out:
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20443 <---- The script that was mentioned.
Topic: Marvel Movie Rumor thread. (Read 10208 times)