[MUSIC PLAYING]
Remember this?
It's the finale of 2000'S X-Men, and Rogue
has been captured by Magneto, who
wants to exploit her power to turn all humans into mutants.
All in all, pretty typical Magneto stuff
and yet, the plot like Erik's machine,
is literally revolving around Rogue.
So how did we go from that to this silent cameo in Days
of Future Past a mere 14 years later?
How could a character start off so integral to a franchise,
and end up being treated like an embarrassing ex not even four
movies later?
This is a two pronged answer--
the comics, and movie politics.
Despite occupying a large amount of narrative real estate
in comics, throughout the 1990s, Rogue's arc ran out of gas.
She stopped being one of the go-to story driven characters.
After Chris Claremont was removed
from the X-Men in the mid 90s, no one other than Claremont
really knew what to do with her.
She just kind of coasted into the 2000s on nostalgia
for the great highs the character
had enjoyed under his tenure as a writer.
Because sometimes a franchise's need
to get bigger with each installment, leads
to once essential characters with nowhere to go.
You can't keep inviting people to a party
and expect every guest to be treated equally.
But how could this happen to Rogue, a fan favorite character
and integral member of the X-Men team?
How could she end up with less screen time than Mystique?
To answer that, we have to go back to the beginning.
The year 2000 was an exciting time to be a Marvel fan.
The company had narrowly survived a bankruptcy
and was seeing a resurgence because of potential movie
adaptations.
It was two years after Blade, which
proved that not only could Marvel movies be
actually entertaining, but they could also be profitable.
And now we were getting to an X-Men movie
with Patrick Stewart as Professor X. Fan
casting was coming to life.
The X-Men were coming to the big screen and it was looking good.
No one was thinking about the comics at this point, though,
and how they had basically stopped laying creative track
for future adaptations.
This will come into play later.
Claremont, a writer known for his complex depictions of women
characters, piloted the X franchise
to being the highest selling comic
on the market during his almost 20 year time
writing Marvel's Merry Mutants.
However, after creative differences,
Jim Lee saw him pushed off of the 1992 relaunch
of objective-less X-Men # 1, the highest selling comic of all
time.
The line lost focus and drastically dipped in quality.
Of course, the movie execs weren't worried about this.
They were only concerned with making one good movie.
However, the fact that creators like Fabian Nicieza, Scott
Lobdell, and Rob Liefeld just didn't have Claremont's story
sense, dialogue chops, or intimate knowledge
of the intricate plotting required
to balance the ever-expanding cast,
is not only a direct reason why the late 90s X-Men books
were so bad, but also why Rogue, specifically, was sidelined.
General audiences were pretty unfamiliar with Jack Kirby's
perennially beset upon mutants, their only major exposure
outside of the comic book world, was Haim Saban's X-Men,
the animated series.
So the producers were smart to have
a character as an entry point.
Think Neo in The Matrix.
So who do they use to introduce us
to the wild world of the uncanny X-Men?
Through Rogue, the very character that
is going to be pushed aside rapidly.
In X-Men, we have a prologue that
sets up the world of the mutants and the central conflict
between Professor X and Magneto.
We meet Marie D'Ancanto, a.k.a.
Rogue.
One reason fans could expect big things from the character
is that she was being played by Anna Paquin, an actual Oscar
winner for her role in The Piano.
And after Patrick Stewart and Halle Berry,
Paquin was one of the biggest names on the call sheet.
An actor of her caliber in the role
seemed to indicate big things to come.
And in the first movie, the fans wishes were fulfilled.
In the first act of the movie, Rogue
accidentally puts her boyfriend into a coma
and runs away, bumping into Wolverine.
And then they have to go on the run, leading the two of them
to meeting the X-Men.
The important thing is that the movie
wouldn't work without Rogue.
It's through her that we are introduced
to the world of mutants.
We ask the questions we would want to ask,
like how do the X-Men work.
She's also a young woman, sympathetic, and rightly
horrified by her powers--
elements that make it easy for the audience
to relate with her.
And then at the end of the movie,
her power-absorbing abilities are central to the plot.
For Rogue fans, it was exciting to see
that she was a big deal in the movie
because of how important she became in the books.
Fans had every reason to hope that the sequels would
have Rogue level up and get super strength, flight,
a snazzy jacket, and a romance with Gambit.
Unfortunately, with each movie, Rogue
became less and less integral to the story.
X2 has her around for some big scenes,
but you could remove her from the story entirely
and nothing would change at all.
And still no new powers.
In X-Men: The Last Stand, she actually
takes a cure for her mutant powers,
and we have never been further away from on-screen Rogue
that we all expected.
And then in Days of Future Past, this--
a blink if you miss it moment, if there ever was one.
And yes, they released a Rogue Cut of Days of Future Past that
included some additional scenes of her rescue
and healing Logan's mind, but none of it
felt essential in an already over 2-hour movie.
In a featurette on the Rogue Cut disc,
producer Hutch Parker explained, "None of us
wanted to see that sequence go, but that was the story line.
Because it was so self-contained,
it really was its own separate mission,
that it actually could be lifted with the least
amount of negative impact on anything
that came before or after."
So even in the Rogue Cut of the movie,
her presence is pretty pointless.
Rogue seemed to be in the sequels out
of a sense of obligation.
In essence, she really never became Rogue at all.
You could blame that partially on the fact
that Fox didn't have the rights to the Ms Marvel character.
In the comics, Rogue levels up because she
absorbs Ms Marvel's powers for herself.
It all happened in Avengers Annual Issue Number
10, when Ms Marvel, a.k.a.
Carol Danvers, went up against Mystique,
who was Rogue's adopted mother.
In order to protect Mystique, Rogue saps Carol.
Since they couldn't put Ms Marvel in the movies,
Rogue had no way to get super strong or the power of flight.
This is also to say nothing of the fact
that after her golden heyday of being written by Claremont,
Rogue struggled to maintain the spotlight.
After the romance between her and Gambit was resolved,
she was stripped of her powers for a time,
which the fans hated.
Then she was made the leader of X-Men:
Legacy, which has a cult following, but never really
broke out.
She also wasn't prominently featured
in either Morrison or Quitely's New X-Men,
a run specifically targeted at fans
of the films of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing
X-Men, meant to be a prestige return to form.
She just wasn't there for the two defining
reboots of the team, which left filmmakers
with little to draw from.
And then of course, there's Hugh.
Besides copyright issues, there was another elephant
in the room that kept Rogue from achieving her full potential
in the movies--
Hugh Jackman.
Although Jackman was a veritable unknown when he was first
cast in the movie, his charismatic performance
would make him the movie's breakout star,
a worldwide superstar, and the face of the franchise.
He was a bigger part of the movies and the team
than he ever was in the comics.
So far, Jackman's still the only member of the original movie
to get a solo film.
In fact, he got three, one of which was great,
one's OK, and one we don't talk about.
[WOLVERING YELLING]
So between copyright issues and Wolverine's popularity
with audiences, rogue never stood a chance.
But the X-Men movies aren't the only franchise
to have forgotten about a cast member.
Part of the reason that characters could be forgotten
is because each sequel has to be bigger than the one before it,
and usually that means adding more cast members.
And for every minute of runtime given to a new character that's
added, there's that much less time for everyone else.
Like the Alien movies, they're merciless to any character that
isn't played by Sigourney Weaver or Michael Fassbender,
killing off beloved characters like Newt, Reese, and Shaw
in between actual movies.
These poor souls didn't even get the luxury
of being killed on screen.
The Star Trek: Next Generation movies
struggled to focus on anyone that wasn't Picard or Data.
In a TV show, there's time to focus from character
to character over 20 plus episode seasons,
but it's easy for your Geordi's or Crusher's to get lost
in the move to the big screen.
So what's the lesson here?
Maybe that the very characters that help kick off a franchise,
can sometimes end up with a sort of Pyrrhic victory.
The X-Men movie success led to sequels,
which led to the need for more mutants,
and that meant less time for Rogue.
Add to that the copyright issues with Ms Marvel that
sapped Rogue for any potential growth,
and Hugh Jackman's super-stardom eclipsing everyone else.
The movies, like Rogue herself, kept
absorbing more and more star power
until something or someone had to give.
And that someone was Rogue herself.
And well, that's it for today's episode.
If you enjoyed this one, press the like button down below,
and if you haven't done so yet, please
also hit the Subscribe button.
On the screen right now are hopefully, two or more videos.
Click on either of those and hopefully, I'll
see you for the next video.