X-Men: Days of Future Past

The X-Men send Wolverine to the past in a desperate effort to change history and prevent an event that results in doom for both humans and mutants.

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Director: Bryan Singer

Writer[s]: Simon Kinberg, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn,

Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Peter Dinklage, Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Evan Peters

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2000’s X-Men might be the most important comic book movie ever made, in that it was the launching point for this generation of blockbuster comic book movies, which have been without a doubt the biggest genre of summer films for the past three or four years. After the original X-Men trilogy stumbled in it’s third and final installment [which seems to be the standard for comic book films now, with Spiderman 3 and Iron-Man 3 both scoring worse than their previous installments], the focus was switching towards individual hero films, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was born to start the new trend. But after some early pirating troubles, rushed production, and other issues, the film was considered a failure, and the X-Men were looking wholly defeated. That was when another first was made: 2011’s X-Men: First Class. A prequel to the original trilogy, First Class found an entirely new cast, save Hugh Jackman, to play the same characters and bring all of the origin stories together into one film. And it worked. First Class is probably the best X-Men film to date. Finally, as people awaited a follow-up to First Class, people wondered how they would move forward in time towards when the original X-Men took place with this new cast. In one last final original, first-of-its-kind film, the creators of First Class combined the First Class cast with the original trilogy to create the biggest ensemble action/adventure film cast ever put together in: X-Men: Days of Future Past.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

A younger and more reluctant Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, sets out on a “unexpected journey” to the Lonely Mountain with a spirited group of Dwarves to reclaim a their stolen mountain home from a dragon named Smaug.

The Hobbit trilogy currently in production is so wildly interesting to me because for the first time ever in film a single book will be adapted into three separate films, and the book isn’t even that terribly long to begin with. This could and should be the most true and accurate adaptation we have ever seen. Not only that, but this was the first book I ever read for my own interest, so I have long wondered what Hollywood, and recently Peter Jackson, could create from it.