Ratner Confident That X-Men 3 Was Awesome. Us Geeks Just Don’t Get It!
Brett Ratner is a real man’s man. King of the castle. Pure film gold. Or so he thinks. To the movie die hards, he’s “that turd who fucked up the X-Men”. To the rest of us, he’s just a turd in general.
Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. No sir. En a recent talk with StarPulse about his various movies over the years, the Ratman defended X-Men: The Last Stand from the major fan backlash that the otherwise commercially succesfull film endured. When the Rat was asked if the comic book demographic were the hardest group to please, he had this to say:
“Absolutely. Bryan Singer gave me the best advice when I was doing “X-Men 3,” Bryan is a really good friend of mine. Bryan said, “Whatever you do, do not read the Internet.” I’m like, “Why?” He’s like, “First of all, they hated on me the whole time I was making ‘X-Men’ and ‘X-Men 2.’ They said, ‘Gambit should have been the star of the movie’” They’re such rabid fans, they’re so passionate about their comic book characters that they think that their favorite character should be the star of the movie. Someone might be passionate about Iceman being the star. So, you can’t win. Everyone’s going to have their own so just stay away from their opinion and do what you feel’s best.
I kind of made rules for myself. I said to the writers — Zak Penn and Simon Kinberg — I only want to put scenes in this movie that exist from actual comic books. That way I protect myself. Even though I protect myself they’re still saying, ‘Why the f*ck did [he] kill Professor X?’ He died in five different comic books! People are crazy. ‘Brett Ratner killed Professor X! How dare he do that!’ He died in five different comic books and came back!”
The ratmeister certainly doesn’t seem to like the comic book nerds any more than they like him because as the interview went on, the tone worsened. The rat acknowledges that although his movie isn’t all that smart — that’s what Singer excelled at — his movie is more fun than Singer’s two. I guess that can be argued. He also goes on to claim that all the haters were the ones who ended up making the movie the hit that it was, stating that even though everybody claimed to hate it so much from the get go, they all went to see it anyway. What do you think? Is there sense to what the rat is saying, or is he way off? Are all the comic book people wrong with their hate for Ratner? Shout off in the comments.
Comments (21)
I think Ratner is hit or miss. It seems to be when he is hired to do a job, it’s to emulate someone else, Red Dragon and Xmen 3 as examples. Mind you I liked Red Dragon. As far as Xmen 3 is concerned, I really don’t think it’s any worse then the first Xmen film. I’m not really jumping up and down at the possibility of Bryan Singer returning for a “fourth” Xmen film.
Posted by Captain N on October 14th, 2009i wasn’t a fan of the 3rd movie, but he does bring valid arguments regarding the fanbase thing.
Posted by Napalm on October 14th, 2009X3 had better action than x1+2. The x movies haven’t really too been bad, they just aren’t outstandingly great. As a fan I’ve only seen these films once in the theater and never watched them again. If the fans were won over they would probably spend 3-5 x as much rather than viewing only once.
Posted by Duke Togo on October 14th, 2009X3’s problem is that it isn’t long enough considering the number of characters. The majority of things people complain about in X3 are things that are absolutely not Ratner’s fault, that were part of the script that Singer would’ve worked on anyways. He’s absolutely right about stuff like Professor X, people were way too used to these comic book heroes and their unkillable heroes that when something finally shook that up, they were so afraid of what that meant that they felt they had to rebel.
Posted by Goon on October 14th, 2009@Goon
I would argue that Ratner’s choice in dialogue would not have appeared in a Singer film. Even though X1 had the famous “You know what happens when a toad gets struck by lightning…”, it didn’t distill every character relationship down to two sentence conversations. Iceman: “I don’t care about boning you, Rogue”; Rogue: “Every boy cares about boning me!”.
FWIW, I didn’t have a problem with characters getting killed off. I did have a problem with the lack of weight in their deaths.
Posted by mrbenning on October 14th, 2009I’m no fan of Brett Ratner, but I liked X3 better than the first two movies. I actually thought the first two X-men movies were pretty bad (X1 was just too rushed and the story of X2 didn’t interest me–although, Magneto’s escape from the platic jail cell was pretty cool). Let’s face it, the X-Men franchise is pretty shitty in general, and the hard-core comic book fans are never going to be satisfied. I had fun in X3 and didn’t really see why everybody was hating on Ratner and the movie more than Singer and the previous two movies. I thought Kelsey Grammar as Beast was pretty sweet (Beast was one of my favorite X-men as a youngin).
Posted by dan on October 14th, 2009I liked X3 more than most it seems, but X1 & X2 is still a lot better.. I hope Singer does come back
Posted by pcch7 on October 14th, 2009While its the weakest in the series, I personally still enjoyed it.
Posted by Slushie Man on October 14th, 2009“I did have a problem with the lack of weight in their deaths.”
X’s death was pretty awesome, i dont care what anyone says.
Posted by Goon on October 14th, 2009How do people get an avatar pic on here?
Posted by Slushie Man on October 14th, 200910# – Slushie Man, http://en.gravatar.com/
Posted by Kasper on October 14th, 2009I fucking hate Hugh Jackman. That tool, hes too fucking tall/gay to be wolverine.
That alone ruined the movies for me.
Posted by mark on October 14th, 2009I didn’t pay for my ticket so I’m fine with Ratner saying what he wants. I saw it, thought it was mediocre but would rather last stand than origins.
Posted by Byron on October 14th, 2009@MARK
I totally agree. Hugh Jackman looked like he should dance across the battle field singing as he kills people rather than fucking shit up Wolverine style.
Viggo Mortensen would have been awesome as Wolverine and if Viggo was walking down the street today and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine tried to start shit Viggo would just giv Hugh a look of badass and Hugh would explode in complete pussy-ness.
Posted by soldierboy on October 14th, 2009Are we still talking about X-men 3?
Posted by swarez on October 14th, 2009There were some good points, but to say that fans wanted Gambit to be the star is retarded. They just wanted Gambit to be in it. And another thing that bothered me was the fact that sure they had a lot of mutants in the film, but you couldn’t tell who any of them were because they looked like Matrix cast offs.
Posted by Paul on October 15th, 2009Singer’s films had dialogue that was just as cheesy and raped characters just as hard. I’ll never understand why people think X3 was such an enormous downgrade.
Posted by Ryan M. on October 15th, 2009throughout all of X3, my mind just kept saying, “Ratner=Rush Hour + Rush Hour 2″ a person can’t focus or enjoy a movie with a distraction like that
Posted by noah on October 16th, 2009Ya, definitely don’t think X3 was the strongest one. It was just a lot of poor judgements made. Cyclops, Professor X … I mean come on, WTF? And what exactly was the movie about? The X-Men stopping the bad guys from destroying a weapon they didn’t want either?
Posted by Chris on October 16th, 2009on a side note….
Posted by Pete on October 16th, 2009Ratz is running a side project whose sole aim is to sell focused product placement into mainstream hollywood blockbusters…
Ratner is the biggest idiot in hollywood, or one of them at least. Ask him why not a single fan wants him back.
Posted by M-Cat on October 17th, 2009Leave a Reply