Will the new X-Men be First Class?

X-Men, released in 2000, is credited by many for reviving the genre of superhero movies. The likes of Spiderman, Batman and Iron Man followed much later on, after Charles Xavier and his mutants had set the stage once again for movies based on the traditional theme of good versus bad, where a man (or in this case, men and women) with power and ability superior to those of a commoner has to step up and take on the responsibility of vetting out justice wherever the system fails. The sequel X-Men 2 did better than the first and was followed by the third movie of the trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, that grossed $459 million in worldwide revenues to become the biggest hit of the franchise. The X-Men series is however filled with numerous characters, enacted by known stars like Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halle Berry and relatively unknown stars who were climbing up the popularity charts like Anne Pacquin and James Marsden. And with the rising salaries, the studio decided it best to stop bringing them all together and instead create spin-offs on the individual characters. Not a bad decision! They first talked about the story of the most popular of the mutants, Wolverine, in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And now they are entering the past lives of two of the oldest mutants, Xavier and Magneto, in X-Men: First Class.

X-Men: First Class will unravel the story of the creation of Xavier's X-Men and Magneto's Brotherhood. It will bring forth the difference in ideologies of two of the most enigmatic characters of the series and explain the reasons why the two friends chose to go on separate paths though with the same objective in their mind, to save their kind. X-Men: First Class has the potential to be more than just a sci-fi/superhero movie. it has the potential to make the audience question about what is right and wrong, about the paths one can take and about the consequences that each path has to offer. And that is what the fans of this franchise will be expecting. Maybe the movie does not have the same box office potential as its predecessors with most of the popular mutants missing (but wouldn't you just love to glimpse a cameo of Wolverine in the movie?), but it can very well turn out to be an intelligent one that would keep the franchise alive. With Wolverine 2 in the makings, and even a possible movie about Deadpool, there is a lot more that the X-Men series still has to offer, and it takes just one bad movie for the audience and the studio to lose faith in a series. I hope X-Men: First Class is not the dubious one. So with fingers crossed, we await its release and hope that mutants will continue to look cooler with each passing day... and that many more movies follow in the series unraveling the past and explaining the future.