X-men 3: New Team Members [SPOILERS]

Sparked by this article: http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=19662 ...

It's time to deviate from the Star Wars talk for a bit to focus on some of our favorite (or not so favorite) mutants. Now, I'd like to keep this thread clean of the "well, it's AICN so I'll just consider this BS" and its ilk. That is not what this is about. It's just to get the ball rolling on the topic.

Looks like fan fave Gambit will be on board as will Beast. With any luck he'll be a nice counterpart to Cyclops, who will hopefully get a bit more screen time. Yeah, I know that the X-flicks have been all about Wolverine (and yes, he is cool) but that can't go on forever. There are many great X-stories to tell besides his. As for Gambit - as long as the role makes sense then I'm all for it. Let's split 'em up and knock 'em down. Now would be a perfect time to have the X-men face off against the Sentinels. My question would be: will they cast him as a younger type or older type? Probably younger, but you never know. I'll leave the real X-men fans to that debate.

And as for Warren Worthington, Angel. Wait!! It's not Warren, it'll be (fill in female's name), instead. Wanda? Wilma? Wendy? Yikes. I've never been an Angel fan so this change is fine by me. More females on the team is ok. But tampering with established continuity? Hopefully, there will be a reason for the change.

This brings me to my next point: changing established and loved characters. Battlestar Galactica did it. It worked for some and not for others. If you go by the ratings, then most folks either are oblivious (like myself) to the change or simply don't care. A gender change is a pretty large switch. It doesn't have to be but in our society it certainly makes a large difference.

But this is different. X-men historically as been far more popular than Galactica. Maybe not the new BSG, but you know what I mean. The Angel character has been around since the beginning. Personally, I like having more women on the team and I never loved the Angel character overall.

Discuss.

I think it would be silly to make Angel a girl. Especially since the Marvel Universe isn't lacking for female mutants. They could bring in Dazzler or Polaris or Aurora or Wolfsbane or Blink or whoever.

Although there was a female Angel character during Grant Morrison's run, so maybe that's who they're referring to. But she was lame. Give me Dazzler anyday.

ANGEL! FINALLY ANGEL!!!

...but a woman? Ah well, can't be too picky, I guess. For some reason, though, I've got a feeling the change may have to do with the fact that Angels are usually depicted as beautiful women.

But still...at least Angel lives somehow. As long as they don't go all Archangel.

I'm glad to see that Gambit might be on screen fiinally, as he's my second favorite X-Man. (take a wild guess at my first) I hope they go with some one in their early twenties, old enough to have been around and done things but not too old, if they decide to hook him up with Rouge, we'll go "ewww!"
I'm less suprised to that Beast is on board, since Dr. McCoy was in X2, sans fur.
As for Angel, I'm indifferent to the character, so I don't care, save that if they changed his gender just to add more female mutants, then that does blow. There's plenty of female X-men(X-People?) to choose from, I'd have liked to seen Psylocke, for example.
All this said, I'm not sure adding more mutants is a good thing.
We already have about twelve major characters, and that's alot. A good part of the criticism about the series so far has been about there just being too many characters to give screen time to and flesh out. So maybe instead of adding three new good guys, plus the one-two new villians, they should give more time to Cyclops, Colossus or whoever.(Not Wolverine, though, he gets his own movie soon, so lets maybe make him more of supoorting character this time.)
Anyway, just a thought that hit me midway though typing this.

Ugh!

That's worse than Starbuck being a chick....

There is a female Angel; she had Beak's kids. I doubt the writers for X3 would know about an obscure character like her unless they read Exiles or Morrison's New X-Men run.

I'm old school X-Men so Gambit means nothing to me; my daughter is looking forward to seeing him and hearing his accent. Beast is very cool, however. I hope they have someone who can be as agile while spouting sesquipedalian delights the way the character should. I don't care if it a bulky looking guy or a furry dude; either is good.

Angel as a woman - I expect they are doing it to allow for another romantic relationship. My concern would be how they do the wings and I hope they don't do that Archangel crap; that sucked as far as I was concerned.

The storyline is altered by Wolvie, Storm and Rogue being there before Angel and Beast so any other history is basically nullified. Hey, they made Toad more powerful and no one griped! I'd like to see Avalanche and the Blob show up in the Brotherhood, maybe Mastermind survived? Do you think Toad is alive? Sabretooth could survive that fall, but not sure about toad with the lightning. That would make Storm a killer, however...

Now, things I've read were that Halle Berry wants a Storm-focused story for her to play that character again. I also heard they are looking at a Magneto movie. That would be cool and allow some other good guy mutants to come to the fore, maybe some of the kids.

Well, my favorite mutie and my least favority mutie. Oh, and Angel, who I could care less about. I mean, I guess I knew that Gambit had to find his way into the movies eventually, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Now Beast... he should have been in it from the beginning.

Although continuity with the comics is nice, it's not something I care heavily about. But major changes (like a character's gender) should be done for a reason. A damn good reason. The mere fact that the Angel has been around consitently for a really long time means that there's something that really works about the character. So you have to be careful when messing with that.

I don't want to see something thrown up there just because someone thought, "hey, let's put some blonde supermodel-type into a really skimpy outfit." I want to see that whoever made this change did it because it's consistent with the core of the character, or the character concept. The Angel is the one who had a very different life from the other X-Men. While others were outcasts and freaks, Angel had money, good looks, and a power that's way up there on the "I want that power" list. Let's see some conflict here, see how the other X-Men react to a mutant like that.

I want to see something interesting. I want to see that the director has a concept of this character, and that there's a reason for the character to be in the movie, and that this isn't something slapped together haphazardly.

I tend to agree that there are too many mutants already, though. Having Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry is actually somewhat problematic, though. Sure, Jackman did a great job, but X-Men is an ensemble book (and in this case, movie). Having a big star in there makes it "Wolverine and the X-Men" instead of The X-Men. I'd love to see Cyclops and Phoenix take center stage, but that's just not going to happen unless they recast them with big name stars. They're not going to make James Marsden and Famke Janssen the stars here, because this is a Hollywood sequel we're talking about, and they won't take any big risks.

If it's a female Angel, then it's probably Angel Salvadore the trailer trash girl that ended up in the special class, a class for the really bad students at the Xavier institute. She has fly-like wings and can vomit acid, and is basically part-human/part-fly. Which includes the reproductive cycle of a fly.