Anghus Houvouras on the end credits scene of X-Men: Days of Future Past… Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen Days of Future Past yet, you might just want to go ahead and skip this one until later…
X-Men: Days of Future Past was another solid movie featuring everyone’s favorite mutants. There are brilliant little character moments and I marveled at its restraint. The third act was practically sedate compared to movies like Iron Man 3, The Avengers, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier that resorted to throwing everything and the kitchen sink on the screen like a hyperactive fit.
The X-Men films have always been a little schizophrenic. Between Brett Ratner doing damage to the series with the horrible third installment, the forgettable cast of secondary characters in X-Men: First Class, and two Wolverine movies that did little to establish any kind of canon, the franchise needed a swift kick in the ass to get it back on track. Days of Future Past did a good job of being entertaining while simultaneously pushing the rest button. For a franchise as convoluted as X-Men has been, that’s a pretty impressive feat.
Like just about every comic book movie in existence, audiences were treated to a preview of what’s to come. In this case, it’s something we were already aware of: the coming of Apocalypse.
The world’s first mutant is introduced in a similar fashion to the Thanos reveal in Avengers, though with far less set up for anyone not already familiar with the comics. You get the chanting hordes of followers and/or slaves chanting the name “En Sabah Nur” (Apocalypse’s not so secret identity) and some display of his power. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was getting a lot of Stargate vibes from this scene. There’s also another interesting little reveal in the final shot:
Did you catch the four horseman sitting on the hill? One would have to assume those are the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Famine, & Death. With those sixty seconds, we get the briefest of glimpses about what’s coming next for Marvel’s mutants at the movies.
I liked what Bryan Singer did with the classic Days of Future Past story line. Taking such a well-known X-Men story and making it work with the absolute mess the franchise had quickly become showed his ability to balance what works for comics and what works for film.
I’m interested to see if he can achieve the same balance with X-Men: Apocalypse. Based on Days of Future Past, I’m remarkably confident that he can.
Anghus Houvouras is a North Carolina based writer and filmmaker. His latest work, the novel My Career Suicide Note, is available from Amazon. Follow him on Twitter.
Originally published May 25, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
