or were you referring to the hilarious SNL sketch where various actors audition for Star Wars?

either way, this does have to do with the movie, and more importantly, Gambit's crazy rabid fans. I could care less, but I already emailed it to my buddy who loves Gambit. they's out there!

Stupid fucking image. This movie looks like shit. This kid can fuck off. And Hugh Jackman should still to tap dancing on pianos on Broadway.

I guess we should all drink some tainted Koo-Aid and be done with our lives cause that picture tells it all!!!!!!!!!!!

Use the Watcher from What If at the start, or even just don't bother explaining why this is happening (ie where the contradictions with X3: Last Stand would appear) and just do it, recast everyone who won't come back and if a halfway decent job is done, won't it make piles of money?

And have Sentinels. Lots of Sentinels and do them properly this time.

This movie will be bad.

But, as far as a Gambit image...it looks pretty good.

And, Gambit was a cool character. "WAS". When first introduced, he was a Han Solo type. Heroic when pressured, but not trustworthy on his own.

In this movie, he'll not even use his power. It'll be a shitty X-cameo that will leave all of us with blue balls.

Start from scratch, X-franchise.

Pull the trigger, or holster the piece.

Please and thank you.

Squirrel Girl: The deadliest mutant with the lamest powers, name, & costume. Really. Check her in continuity ass kickings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S quirrel_girl

Just imagine how Dr. Doom or any of the other people she's kicked the shit out must have felt telling their friends.

"Squirrel Girl? Seriously? Pussy."

Throw Doop into the mix.... PWNED! =)

Pretty decent pic of Gambit. Consistent with the movieverse X-Men. I don't think that anybody with half a brain & half-realistic expectations would expect the lame blue and purple costume with all of that gigantic piping anyway.

I actually prefer the more realistic approach. It's consistent with what Marvel's doing with most of their movies anyway.

http://tinyurl.com/5hs98 4

On the plus side, he's great in Friday Night Lights... on the down side, he was in that really horrible movie, The Covenant. Fingers crossed.

Look, I don't care who is directing this thing, but so long as it isn't Singer, there stands a good chance that we might actually see at least a fourth of the film's budget on screen.

Would look kind of Stoopid if he was wearing his costume!? Wolverine wears a white vest when he's doing his weekly shop!P>Dont get so negative im sure he wont be poncin round in a purple shirt the whole time!?

I always liked Gambit better than Wolverine, anyways. I have a thing for underdogs, though ;)

You know who I wanna see, even if just for a bit? Jubilee. When I was a kid, I frickin' worshiped her. I think it was just because I felt like I related to her a lot.

But anyways, yeah, I'm going to join the chorus... the picture is fine. Doesn't tell ya too much, so what's so bad about it? I'll withhold judgement until I see the trailer. I was planning on skipping this movie, but now that I see they'll be exploring other characters that I loved, I'll check it out.

Bi-i-g 'Meh' from me. folks. Lazy, lazy, lazy.

Combine that with this douche-bag in the purple shirt.....GOOD LUCK FOLKS! I can't wait to hear the jokes about this one.

Of course of all those types of character created as a way to be "the new...", Gambit, Cable, Bishop were far better than the ones that came in the latter half of the 90's when Marvel was going through its financial woes. Wasn't there a mutant who joined the X-men who could control slugs? Whatever happened to that guy?

I don't see why we coulnd't have had a fourth X-men film. Charles in a 'new' body, more for Colossus to do, Nightcrawler back, that Siryn/Banshee-girl-thing introduced. Maybe a tweaking of the Hellfire Club storylines - a sinister, seemingly respectable bunch of industrialists rather than the tiresome big mutant super-baddie. I dunno...it just seemed like there was loads of untapped possibilities there...

I'll no doubt end up seeing Wolverine, but a Sabertooth that doesn't look like he ought to be in a Scandinavian doom-metal band simply isn't Sabertooth for me. You can keep Gambit either way - never liked the fucker. Oh well, it could be worse - they could've added Jubilee...

Still, if we get any of that James Howlett/Rose/Dog bollocks, I'm putting the nachos down and walking out...

These were the kind of guys that Marvel always seemed to introduce with a bunch of limp bluster. They'd give them a fancy, explosive cover and say something cornball like, "MEET BISHOP! AND ONCE YOU DO, NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME!!!"

Come on. You know what I'm talking about!

One of the reasons why the older characters work so well WAS the simplicity, not despite of it. I mean most of the early heroes work so well is because they were a normal person before they got their powers (Peter Parker was a nerdy student, Flash was a scientist, Hal Jordan was a pilot, Tony Stark was a rich inventor, etc.) so are ability to relate to them and empathize with them is much easier. Except for getting powers, Peter Parker or Barry Allen or Hal Jordan or even Ben Grimm is a lot like me, and has many of the same problems I do plus exciting problems I don’t (I don’t have an arch-enemy nor do I have to save the world). It is wish fulfillment, people living the life you wish you could be. Even Superman works here, with him born with the powers of a god but pretends to be a mild-mannered midwestern man. Take out the powers of a god and pretends part and you’ve got me.

Even characters that have always had powers or lived lives unlike ours have something about them that I can relate to, or our simplistic enough not to disrupt my suspension of disbelief. I mean, who doesn’t understand Batman’s simplistic drive for Justice, or wish that they could be considered “special” and “unique” like the X-Man. I mean, that is what makes the earliest X-Men so great, they were just normal kids who were born with special powers, a simple parable about being unique. Then it developed into a simple parallel about accepting those different and prejudice (race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, depending on the writer). So it was always best to have the X-Men be simple normal people from a varied background so anyone could relate to them and feel as if they understood what it was like to be “feared and hated.”

Then Wolverine was introduced and changed everything. I don’t hate Wolverine and actually used to love him, but unfortunately he started a bad trend: characters who exist completely and utterly in a superhero universe. I mean, there is nothing remotely “real” about Wolverine, or anyway we normal people can relate to him. He lives in a world that doesn’t really resemble ours. He isn’t a man who undergoes one origin to take him from normal man to hero, he has like 10 origins all together, anyone of them good enough for one hero. He is a mutant; an un-aging man who fought in a number of wars; someone who underwent a mysterious operation to turn him into a weapon; a formal feral child; and an ex-commando and spy. And that is all BEFORE he becomes Wolverine and joins the X-Men.

But Wolverine works because he is the member of a team were everyone else has a pretty much normal background (excluding the mutant part). Plus, Wolverine’s basic premise is that of a berserker mutant with a mysterious past who was experimented on by someone unknown. A different media depiction of Wolverine doesn’t have to use what everything that has been presented as part of his past, just the stuff that is essential.

However, the characters that imitated Wolverine’s convoluted origins don’t work as well in the long run. I mean Gambit is a Creole mutant thief and a member of the Thieves’ Guild that is warring against the Assassin’s Guild. Hard for a normal person to say, “Wow, he resembles me”. Same with Cable, Deadshot, Bishop, and pretty much all the other latter additions to X-Men; they all have back stories of being super-soldiers, commandoes, time travelers, and experts in a bunch of different weapons. AND they are also mutants. That is a far cry from the simple statement of a pilot who is given an alien weapon to fight evil with, or a young boy is bit by a radioactive spider and gains the proportionate strength, speed and agility of it.

I am not knocking these characters, just pointing out that to someone who encounters them for the first time they are harder to appreciate. The only characters are much more relatable and digestible for the early readers and are also easier to adapt to movies and other media. Plus, lets be honest, would any of us be a fan of a Wolverine or a Deadshot if we hadn’t first encountered a Batman or Spider-Man to help ease the transition to these types of characters.

SIDE NOTE: Someone brought up Cyclops, and how they like him now better. Well that might be the case, but he wouldn’t have reached this stage if hadn’t gone through his broody stage and his whiny stages. It is a character growth that makes him seem much more real. But it all started out because he first was just a young orphan who happened to be born with a mutant power, nothing more or nothing less.

I love AICN, but could we be a little faster with stuff like this?

Plus old villains used to plot. People might laugh at it now, but I always loved the dastardly schemes of Mysterio or the Penguin who were always trying to figure out a way to pull of a crime or defeat their opponent in style. What do Venom, Sabretooth and Doomsday do? They just want to beat the crap out of their archenemy and kill him. No working in the background, no clever manipulations, no trying to tire him out or trick him. It’s like watching a Bond movie where the villains goal is to meet Bond and just shoot him right there or be killed by him. Movie would only last 10 minutes. Finally, the villains in the past had simpler origin, making it more “believable” to me. Scorpion just underwent an experiment to be given a variation of the same powers as Spider-Man; Mysterio was a special effects whiz you turned to crime; Captain Cold stole a freeze ray; Magneto was born a mutant. Then look at Venom, he is two separate origins: a reporter who hates Peter Parker and blames him for his life’s failure; and an alien symbiote who was rejected by Peter and came back for revenge. THEN they teamed up to form Venom. The problem with the Spider-Man movies is that they should have introduced Venom over the course of two movies: first movie introduce Brock and the symbiote, second movie have them merge to form Venom.

Harry, give hime Mori's job when he goes...

Having him and Rogue "fall in love" was lame. When I was 13 I did not want to red a love story, I wanted to watch some Sentinels getting exploded.

Not everyone takes every job offered to them just for the cash. I'm lookin' at you Samuel L.

Secondly, one of the reason characters nowadays are so “overdone” is because they are third generation characters in a superhero world, making them thrice removed from the normal world. By this I mean that the first heroes in the Golden Age and the Silver Age were only once removed from reality: a normal person who gains powers, or a powerful being who pretends he is normal. But his origin and background was rather simplistic.

Later on writers started acknowledging the history and continuity within the shared universe, so you had second generation heroes: characters who either took on the same identity as a past hero (Flash II, III or IV; Ant-Man II or III), who consciously bases his identity on a currently existing hero (Batgirl, Ms. Marvel), someone who gains powers from a currently existing hero (She-Hulk, Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr.), or has the same origin as another hero but a different identity or even powers (Doc Samson, Harpy and Abomination created by gamma rays; Man-Thing, Nomad and Nuke created by a variation of the Super-Soldier Formula; Black Goliath used the Pym Particle; the U-Foes hit by cosmic rays just like the FF). These characters can only exist after it has been acknowledge that the first character or object already exist (Wolverine was originally one of these since you had to first introduce mutants and adamantium before you could create him).

Then there is the third generation of heroes: characters who exist not because of one other character but because an entire shared comic book universe exist. These are the most meta-characters of all. The Young Avengers, the new Red Hood, Alexander Luthor, Superboy Prime, Venom, and a whole wing of the X-Men: Rachel Summers, Cable, Gambit and Bishop. Thanks to the fact they live in a comic book, almost anything is possible or feasible, hence it isn’t hard to imagine a Thieves’ Guild, or them having a mutant as a member. Or look at Cable, the probably the most meta character of them all: mutant son of Madelyne Prior and Scott Summers, taken into future, trained as a warrior, then sent back in time to fight against his clone, Stryfe (yeah, that makes sense).

As I said before, I have nothing against many of these characters. As a comic book fan I love it when writers use something from the past in a new and interesting way. My favorite characters of the 80s were guys like Hobgoblin, Beta Ray Thor, Goliath and Alpha Flight; characters who could only exist in a shared universe. However, it is hard to introduce them to a mainstream audience who is not as comic book savvy as we are and expect to accept them. It isn’t hard for a casual fan to suspend disbelief when a villain fights Iron Man in one of his former armors; it is completely different to expect them to suspend disbelief when you tell them that it is a villain fighting Spider-Man in his former costume, which is also an alien symbiote.

So if you are going to introduce a character like Gambit to the a film audience, you might very well consider eliminating some of the things from his background (like the Thieves’ Guild) and just have him be a mutant gambler, thief and ladies man.

I should have added in my above argument I was really trying to apply it to those characters that I think will work in a movie or other medium. I personally love the over-laden continuity of comic universes, but I don't expect a casual filmmaker to be able to grasp or make sense of someone like Rachel Summers, the unborn daughter from a alternate future timeline of a character who died before she ever gave birth to Rachel (and this wasn’t even really that character, but a cosmic entity who usurped her identity). I am sure he would get that character.

The true litmus test of what the audiences will accept will be the Watchmen movie. Forgoing that it might suck as a film, will audience accept a realist superhero movie about characters they have never heard about in an alternate timeline? I mean, I thin audience might be able to handle the superhero aspect, but through in the fact it takes place in 1984 where America won the Viet Nam war and Richard Nixon is still president, and the Cold War is about to turn hot? That is the answer I am waiting for. If they are, then maybe they’ll also accept a universes where giant green behemoths, Norse Thunder Gods, men in futuristic armor, and unfrozen WWII super-soldiers all exist together.

He is gay and sucks much ass.

Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay.

A haiku by Micturating Benjamin.