> > They got along fine for twenty years without him. So make a movie about the X-MEN, and not WOLVERINE.
>
> They can't. This isn't the Fantastic Four. The X-men is ever evolving as a group, just as the movies show. Wolverine is one of the few consistent ones (to go along with most popular). And that is why they are making a Woverine movie. I guess they might be planning on a Magneto movie, too.

Anyone but me remember the New Fantastic Four? Wolverine, Spider-man, Ghost Rider, and the Incredible Hulk. But I digress.

I always, when I was into comics (a *few* years back, to be sure), preferred the Fantastic Four to the X-Men. I think a lot of this - and this is somewhat related to this discussion - is because the Fantastic Four was first and foremost a *team,* whereas the X-Men was more like a bunch of superstars who put up with each other. The FF were individually pretty tough, sure, but everything they accomplished - the way they beat the really tough villains and got through really demanding situations - was because they all complemented each other and worked as a team. The X-Men got through tough battles because of a few wildly overpowered superstars who basically couldn't be beaten.

Wolverine, for instance. He's extremely hard to injure, regenerates (very rapidly) any damage he DOES take, and has claws made out of magic metal that can cut through anything. Look at just the original X-Men, for that matter; they're not at all in balance. Iceman can basically duplicate anything any of the rest of them can do and can do a zillion other things, too. Basically, design like this leads to Superfriends Syndrome.

You remember the Superfriends. The core membership was basically Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, the Flash, Hawkman, and Aquaman. And in every single episode, some means of writing Superman and the Lantern out of the action had to be devised or the other characters would have nothing to do. The X-Men are in the same sort of boat; the neato utility characters like Nightcrawler will get stories written around them every so often, but when there's something *serious* going on, they get left behind and the big guns take over.