With the release of its final X-franchise offering, Fox has hammered the final nail into the coffin of a franchise that has refused to accurately depict the time-honoured art of candle making, defying all common sense and the expectations of legions of disappointed fans.
Not everyone reads the X-Men comics as a metaphor for the decline of the candle making industry, with the 1879 invention of the incandescent light bulb, but given that Fox had already given Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg a chance to tell this story with the poorly-received X3: The Last Stand, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that he could have tried a different approach to the source material.
As fans have come to expect by this point, we see Jean Grey become the Phoenix, and once again we pick up up a decade after the previous film (this time it’s the 90s) but at no point does the film even mention the immense impact that so-called “glow-ball” candles had on that decade, nor the burgeoning resurgence of artisanal candle sales that was aided by the first baby-steps of the Internet.
Instead, once again, we have to watch Xavier give speeches and Magneto be sad. How much more exhilarating would it have been to see the continuous production of molded candles made possible during the industrial revolution by a cylinder with a moveable piston that could eject candles as they solidified?
The sad truth is that with the rights of this franchise now reverting to Marvel, we may never know.
