Common Sense

And it looks like the people picked X-Men over Da Vinci.

In its four-day, opening weekend, X-Men: The Last Stand earned roughly $120 million dollars. By comparison, The Da Vinci Code has earned $145 million in two weeks of release. Clearly, people will pay good money to see Hugh Jackman over Tom Hanks any day of the week.

Oddly enough, though the two are competing for your box office dollars, they share the same upside: one Sir Ian McKellen.

McKellen has got to be one of the greatest actors of all time. Watching the first two X-Men movies today on FX, it became readily apparent that he and Patrick Stewart are the only reasons I can watch them. It’s like watching Masters of the Universe. It’s a God-awful movie, but you can get through it by paying attention to Frank Langella’s performance as Skeletor. He’s such a good actor that the rest of the cast, particularly Dolph Lundgren, look feeble by comparison.

The scene in X2 aboard the jet where he’s talking to Pyro, it is just a reflection of how good McKellen is and how that part could not be played seriously by anyone else. “What is your real name, John?… You’re a god among insects. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” If anyone else had said those lines I would have been rolling my eyes.

So what have we learned today? LOTR, the X-Men trilogy, The Da Vinci Code; if you have Ian McKellen in your cast, you are sure to make some moolah on opening weekend, no matter how bad a movie it is. I’m going to be putting Apt Pupil and some other McKellen classics on my Netflix queue and eagerly look forward to the day when such a good actor is given a part in a movie worthy of his talents.