Putting the X-Men to the Test

Bryan Singer is one agitated director. Mock-agitated, anyway. It’s February on the Toronto set of “X-Men,” and production is racing along on this $75-million, comic-book-inspired tale of mutant superheroes sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them. Singer is taking a quick timeout to tape a video greeting to legendary comics creator Stan Lee, soon to be feted at a splashy Hollywood launch party for his new superhero Web site.

Because Lee is the man who dreamed up the X-Men for publisher Marvel Comics 37 years ago, it’s only fitting that Singer pay tribute. But there’s also a bit of roast to this toast, as the young filmmaker gives Lee some good-natured grief for creating a fictional universe so sprawling, a guy could go nuts trying to cram it all into a two-hour movie. In fact, Singer reveals, he has cracked a little.

Suddenly, raising his hands into view on the video, he shows that he’s got a set of (prop) razor claws popping out of his tensed knuckles, just like the fury-prone X-Man Wolverine.

Kidding aside, this has to be the least of the pressures Singer and his team are under. Fox has positioned “X-Men” as its event movie of the season, and its expectations are correspondingly huge--as is the buzz on the Internet, although whether the movie will click is one of the summer’s biggest question marks. Although the studio has had two solid performers in “Me, Myself & Irene” and “Big Momma’s House,” those pictures opened after a string of expensive disappointments, the most recent of which was the animated “Titan A.E.”

There’s also the requisite insanely tight deadline. “I remember getting the call from [Fox President] Tom Rothman in Toronto, saying, ‘Congratulations, you have the summer,’ ” Singer recalls, refueling with a mocha shake in an editing suite on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Great, summer 2001!’ ‘No, summer 2000.’ ‘Oh, thanks, I guess.’ ” With a July 14 opening looming, no fewer than seven effects houses have been tag-teaming on the film’s post-production.

And there are other tall orders. “X-Men” boasts an intriguing, accomplished creative lineup, but not the kind that instantly registers as a summer blockbuster (partly a function of the relatively lean budget, as was the decision to shoot in Canada).

Whereas Paramount’s “M:I-2” had Tom Cruise, and Mel Gibson headlined “The Patriot” for Columbia, “X-Men’s” ensemble cast is headed by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. The British thespians play wheelchair-using master telepath Charles Xavier and his hard-line adversary Magneto, respectively, characters with radically disparate approaches to the story’s fictional battle for mutant acceptance. (Professor X runs a school secretly dedicated to teaching mutants to use their powers for the good of society, while Magneto’s worldview is decidedly more militant.)

The film also stars Halle Berry as Storm and 17-year-old Oscar winner Anna Paquin (“The Piano”) as Rogue, two of the mutants under Xavier’s charge. Ray Park (Darth Maul from “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace”) plays Toad, a member of Magneto’s so-called Evil Brotherhood.

Singer, who made his name with the moody, complex fare he delivered in “The Usual Suspects” and “Apt Pupil,” would seem to be another less-than-obvious choice for the popcorn-movie crowd. (“M:I-2,” again, has Hong Kong action master John Woo at the helm, while “Patriot” is directed by “Independence Day’s” Roland Emmerich.) But the choice was a deliberate one, intended to give “X-Men” a distinctly cerebral stamp, says producer Lauren Shuler Donner. “Bryan is a wonderful storyteller with a lot of style, and ‘Usual Suspects’ showed that he could really handle a multi-character cast,” she says. “We knew he would make this more unusual than a plain old action film.”

*

Plenty of people at Marvel Comics--which these days goes by the loftier corporate moniker Marvel Enterprises--are just as anxious to see the “X-Men” movie turn into a mainstream juggernaut. For everything that’s riding on the movie for the filmmakers and Fox, the stakes are arguably highest for Marvel.

“It takes the big pictures to give a kick in the butt to all the ancillary things, from video games to TV shows to toys,” says Marvel Chief Creative Officer Avi Arad, who’s overseen the company’s Hollywood dealings since the early ‘90s. “It’s dangerous to look at ‘Batman’ as an exact model, because there was a billion dollars at work there. But these kinds of movies do drive hundreds of millions of dollars in retail.”

A spring industry overview in New Times (April 6-12) cited figures that placed comics sales at just $375 million last year, while Barnes & Noble and Borders racked up book sales totaling $6 billion. (Before a mid-’90s collapse in the previously booming comics market, yearly sales topped out at $1 billion.) More problematic still, publishers are seeing video games and the Internet continue to erode their young target audience. Comics, then, may be what give characters like the X-Men their creative lifeblood, but a box-office blockbuster and the resulting ancillary opportunities are where the serious money lies.

A case in point is 1994’s “The Mask,” which began life as a cult not-quite-hit from Dark Horse Comics, the industry’s fourth-ranked publisher. Meager sales notwithstanding, Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson believed the character had screen potential--and Jim Carrey and New Line proved him right, with a $120-million-grossing movie that was followed by a cartoon TV series, toys and other ancillary products. Additionally, Richardson says, “ ‘The Mask’ gave us probably a 30% bump in revenue when it came out. And we’re still seeing licensing money from it six years later. It was huge for our [Hollywood] credibility.”

What makes Marvel’s situation unique is that the company is rebounding from a 1996 Chapter 11 filing, the culmination of a messy corporate power struggle involving Wall Street heavyweights Ron Perelman and Carl Icahn. (Marvel was ultimately bailed out through a merger with the action-figure manufacturer Toy Biz.) And while Marvel retained its position as the comics industry’s sales leader throughout the bankruptcy, a sharp ancillary sales spike would be a bold proclamation that the company is back--and that its various characters are ready for their close-ups. Marvel’s sound bite of the moment, as delivered by company President Peter Cuneo and others, is that “X-Men” is “our coming-out party.”

In more ways than one. Despite its packed stable of big-name characters, Marvel has developed a notorious reputation over the years for its Hollywood missteps.

A “Spider-Man” movie is now on the fast track at Columbia, with David Koepp (“Jurassic Park”) scripting and Sam Raimi (“A Simple Plan”) directing, but this comes only after years of torturous legal wranglings to void old rights agreements with lesser players. (The various lawsuits famously cost Marvel a chance to have James Cameron make the movie, although Columbia is reportedly making use of an extended treatment Cameron wrote.)

And though Marvel did enjoy some success with its Bill Bixby-Lou Ferrigno “Incredible Hulk” TV series, it hardly compared to what chief competitor DC Comics--and parent company Time Warner--achieved with the Batman and Superman franchises.

More typically, Marvel has been connected with low-rent duds like the Dolph Lundgren action film “The Punisher.” A Roger Corman-produced “Fantastic Four” cheapie has seen the light of day only as a comics convention bootleg. And with a mea culpa nod to Marvel’s highest-profile flop, Lee jokes, “It’s of paramount importance for ‘X-Men’ to do well--we’ve got to prove ourselves after ‘Howard the Duck.’ ”

Quietly, the company has already started to do just that. Although not marketed as a comics movie, New Line’s $45-million “Blade” was based on a Marvel character, and it was a ’98 box-office winner with worldwide grosses of $117 million. (“Mimic” director Guillermo Del Toro recently signed on to direct Wesley Snipes in “Blade 2.”)

*

For hard-core comics fans, meanwhile, the fact that Marvel finally got a movie right with “Blade” couldn’t be more ironic, given the character’s relative obscurity in the so-called Marvel Universe. Not that “X-Men’s” mutant adventurers were always the stars of the Marvel firmament. Lee has laughingly recalled that he created them in 1963 only because he needed new material, and “I had run out of ways that characters could get their superpowers.

“Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, the Fantastic Four had been hit by cosmic rays. . . . So I said, ‘I’ll make it easy for myself--what if they’re just born that way? What if they’re mutants?’ ”

Over time, though, the comic’s mythos struck a chord with readers, especially after a mid-’70s revamp by Lee’s successors introduced hip characters like Wolverine. (Ask any longtime comics devotee the significance of the number 94, and he’ll rattle it off for you: It’s the number of the first issue of “Uncanny X-Men,” featuring the group’s new lineup.) According to figures compiled by Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest such outfit in the country, “X-Men” and its various spinoff titles have been the best-selling comics in the business for a good 15 years running.

All of which, as Arad contends, makes the “Batman” model an imperfect analogy for “X-Men.” With the exception of a few special projects created by fan-favorite writers and artists, “Batman” comic sales weren’t exactly overwhelming at the time the movie hit. And as author and comics historian Les Daniels (“Batman: The Complete History”) notes, “When the Adam West show came out in the mid-’60s, Batman’s sales were so poor that they were actually considering canceling the comic.”

Yet, Daniels adds, “even though ‘X-Men’ has continually been the most popular title among comics fans, to a large degree, the average citizen doesn’t know who the X-Men are. Whereas everyone knows who Batman is. The penetration of consciousness you achieve with movies or TV is much stronger than you ever get with comics.”

The broadest exposure “X-Men” has received to date was through a cartoon that aired on Fox Kids Network from 1992 to 1998. (Fox also aired a ’96 live-action TV movie based on the “X-Men” spinoff comic “Generation X,” but it generated little more than a blip on the Nielsen radar.)

More animation is on the way, as the WB network recently announced plans for a new “X-Men” cartoon slated to premiere this fall--that old franchise magic is already starting to kick in.

*

For now, though, it remains up to Singer and Co. to cast the all-important master spell on the general public’s imagination. His strategy, he says, is simply to keep “X-Men” real, no matter how unreal the story might seem. “The toughest aspect of this to crack was creating believable human drama in such a fantastical scenario,” the director says. “What if [mutants] really existed? What if this phenomenon really happened?”

Singer recalls a moment with McKellen that was decidedly unlike anything they encountered working together on “Apt Pupil”: “You’ve got Ian McKellen up on cables, in this Magneto outfit and helmet, and I’m saying, ‘I need you to be natural, to be real.’ And he’s like . . .” Singer twists his face into a look of bemused incredulity. “Yet I still want it, because I think ‘X-Men’ deserves that. [The concept] has a very grounded, humanist philosophy. I think that’s what’s made it so accessible to fans for so many decades.”

This sentiment is echoed by Marvel editorial director Chris Claremont, who recently returned to writing the “X-Men” comics after logging a 17-year stint on the title earlier in his career.

“One reason I hope ‘X-Men’ is a success is because it’s a rare concept in the superhero genre, in that it’s actually grounded in a fairly important theme,” Claremont says. “These people are outcasts because they were born different. That’s a reality of life that a lot of people can relate to, the whole idea of prejudice and the need for racial harmony.”

But, he adds with a laugh, “that’s probably dumping a hell of a lot on the movie’s shoulders.”

Claremont’s vote of confidence is significant, reflecting as it does the largely positive buzz on “X-Men” that has emanated from comics circles and on the Internet. For much of the film’s production, the set was virtually locked down--partly, Arad admits, to prevent poisonous chat-room criticism over such fan-fomenting issues as casting choices and how the X-Men’s costumes were being changed for the big screen.

“Obviously we want the fans to love the movie, but at a certain point, we just had to go, ‘OK, trust our instincts,’ ” producer Shuler Donner says.

*

The “X”-faithful seem to be responding. Fox reports that its “X-Men” Web site--complete with a link allowing users to rat out friends and loved ones as mutants--is recording 8 million hits weekly. The fan magazine Wizard recently gave the costume revisions a thumbs-up: “OK, so they’re not wearing their typical blue and yellow spandex. Trust us, it’d never work.” And they’re already embracing Hugh Jackman, a personable Australian actor making his American film debut in the pivotal Wolverine role.

Even for a guy playing a borderline wild man, Jackman admits, the rabid “X-Men” fan base took some getting used to. “It’s kind of daunting in a way,” he says. “I sat down with about 10 science-fiction magazine writers recently, and for a good 15 seconds, there was silence. They were literally staring at me like I was from outer space. And finally they said, ‘You’ve gotta excuse us, man, but--we’re looking at Wolverine. This is amazing. We’ve waited 30 years for this.’ ”

The folks at Marvel know the feeling. *