This past weekend comic book fans were delivered a gift when, for the first time in eight years, a filmmaker crafted an excellent X-Men movie. Though the movie didn't perform exceptionally at the box office, it did get rave reviews from both critics and fans alike. There is, however, one person that isn't too thrilled about all of the reawakened X-Men love: Brett Ratner.
Yesterday the X-Men 3: The Last Stand director took to his Twitter account to post a couple of links to Box Office Mojo, namely the week-by-week breakdown of X-Men movies performance, the summary statistics for all of the X-Men movies, the day-of-the-week numbers for all of the X-Men movies, the total grosses for movies based on Marvel Comics, and, lastly, the top grossing Martial Arts movies since 1980 (this has nothing to do with X-Men, but Rush Hour 2 is on top of the list). On all of the lists, the third film in the X-Men franchise is shown as the most financially successful movie in the group. Following it all up, Ratner Tweeted a couple of hours ago, "I was the first one on line to see X Men First Class and I loved it.. I thought Matthew. Vaughn did a briliant job!! Congrats"
I understand that Vaughn is on record having said, "As it happens, I could have made something a hundred times better than the film that was eventually made. It sounds arrogant, but I could have done something with far more emotion and heart" about X-Men 3, but how petty can you get? Everybody on this planet knows that box office numbers have nothing to do with film quality - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen made $836 million worldwide - and considering most analysts believe First Class' numbers were negatively affected by fans being burned by the two previous efforts, Ratner has nothing to be proud of here. This is just sour grapes from a director who made a poor film and is unwilling to admit it.
