My super-secret plan for world domination through comic book movies

You know who has the potential to be an even more amazing film character than the Joker?

Emma Frost.

Basically, take someone as ruthless and amoral as the Joker (well, a little less, but being a hot babe makes up for it somewhat… oh, come off it, like two out of three fangirls didn’t think the Joker was hot), then… say they’re working for the good guys.

Now, the X-Men movies work best as an ensemble. Think about it. Okay, so it’s also the Wolverine show…

Part 1: Wolverine joins the X-Men.

Part 2: Wolverine discovers his past and resolves his issues with it, making any further exploration of that plot point totally superfluous… oh, sorry.

Part 3: WOLVERINE IS VERY HANDSOME AND ALSO GOOD AT MATH. Also, something about Jean Grey and The Cure. “Friday, I’m in love…”

Obviously, the quality diminishes as the ensemble weakens. Now, a lot of possible characters you could bring on for ensemble would be rather one-note (Nightcrawler) or thematically pointless (Beast, Angel). Plus, they all get along well, especially not that Logan's shaped up and become respectable. Where's the conflict? Emma Frost, now…

One good thing X-Men: The Last Stand did was get the franchise away from the constant “protecting a world that hates and fears them” status quo. After X2, President McKenna accepted mutants, his successor was mutant-friendly, so now mutants are going mainstream. Now, without going too gonzo (Starjammers and Scott’s space pirate dad), we need to maintain the theme of mutant-human tension fueling the movies’ conflicts after Magneto and his terrorist ilk have become archaic.

So, take a cue from Morrison’s New X-Men. Mutants are a niche, cool. And in this atmosphere, the Hellfire Club wants to use this opportunity to seize power.

Also, Scott Summers is alive again. It’s an easy way to get the fans behind a fourth X-Men movie and who else is gonna be leader, Storm? You can pay Halle Berry a couple million dollars to do a shitty job or you can hire James Marsden for twenty bucks and a Danish to be charismatic and fun (yeah, I saw Enchanted, he can pull it off).

So, fourth movie, Hellfire Club doing something nefarious, the team fights them. Fifth movie, bring in Mr. Sinister, Madeline Pryor (yay, Famke Jannsen's back! And as a real villain this time!), the idea of genetic experimentation… and put Emma on the good guys’ side. Obviously, there’s some cool sexual tension between the mourning Scott and Emma, who thinks “yummy yummy tears!”

Cyclops: We need a distraction. Something that will make Goblin Queen really, really mad.

Emma: I'll handle this, bucko.

Cyclops: Emma, wait!

Emma: Hey! Jean or Madeline or whatever your name is (I can't be expected to keep these things straight). I've been fucking your husband. Pretty constantly in fact. And I must admit, he likes it much more with me than with you. In point of fact, he said that compared to me, fucking you was like "effing a pillow."

Goblin Queen: Grrrr...

Emma: Direct quote.

But by bringing her in, you automatically have tension whether she’s going to stay a hero or betray the team. Then you can throw in plots about her winning the acceptance of her teammates, her actually falling in love with Scott, having snark-offs with Ellen Page***… the possibilities are endless. I’m not saying any future X-Men movies should be The Emma Frost Show, but she’d be a neat ensemble darkhorse. And really, who else other than Wolverine is going to put butts in theaters? Iceman?

I think the biggest problem there is that she’s a woman. And that while audiences can laugh at the Joker sticking a pencil through someone’s eyes, they see Emma Frost doing something equally awesome and villainous, they’d go “what a bitch!” (Not letting you off the hook there, LJ fandom.) Which, okay, she is a bitch and a slut, but those are features, not bugs. Sex-positive, bitch new black, yadda yadda. It’s like calling Superman a boy scout. Yeah, he is, wanna make something of it?

Then again, people like Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl, or so I've heard. Cough. So provided you got a really good actress who could make Emma sympathetic, or rather scary and then sympathetic (almost like a retcon… while you thought she was XXX, in reality she was YYY), she could be the next Tony Stark.

Also, you know who would make a good Big Barda?

Rhona fucking Mitra.





Mega-Rod. Looming mighty. Just sayin'.



You know that guy who did those fake Batman 3 posters? I wish I could commission him to turn one of those pictures into Barda wearing her armor. That would be worth at least twenty bucks to me. Fifty, tops.

What? I work retail. I can’t have nice things.

Now, she isn’t ginormous like Barda in the comics, but Brendan Routh wasn’t exactly ripped like Jesus either, and people seemed to like him. Ideally, you’d find an unknown who was basically Gina Carano with acting talent, but what fun is that dream-casting? So let’s trade out GINORMOUS! for sexy-hot British accent that can cut ice, badass femmeness, and tall as hell. I mean, did you see Doomsday? Girl would look alright smashing around Parademons?

Now, I don’t know if Scott and Barda could carry a movie on their own (although I think Iron Man might’ve proved me wrong… c’mon, Big Barda isn’t that much more obscure than Tony Stark), but they’d be great supporting characters in a Superman movie. After all, everyone wants to see Darkseid as the Big Bad, he’s like a non-retarded version of Doomsday (I mean that both in the sense that Darkseid is much smarter than Doomsday and, as a character, Doomsday goes full retard). But Darkseid without Apokolips and the Fourth World and all his minions and cosmic war is… well, Doomsday. And yet there really isn’t time to go into all that in a Superman movie.

Solution? Barda and Scott. They can humanize the conflict, add some new blood to the cast, and just really sell the Darkseid-wants-Anti-Life-Equation plot.

Better yet, for a Wonder Woman sequel (having dealt with Ares and/or Circe with possible Cheetah as henchman), you could have Darkseid trying to steal the Olympians’ power to take over the universe and all that. Diana needs an expert on Apokolips—

Cut to a quaint little suburb in New Hampshire…

If Barda, having been established in a Superman movie, went on to have a sparring match with Diana in a Wonder Woman movie, I think the prevailing WIN from the southeast would couple with the AWESOME from the north and form a hurriYES.

And after that, Barda and Scott would be the perfect characters to round out a Justice League movie. They don’t have dick-measuring contests for leadership, they wouldn’t be in any epic love triangles, there wouldn’t be any unresolved sexual tension (their sexual tension is revolved quite well, thankyouverymuch), but they’d just be fun characters to have around and just expendable enough to create actual tension about whether they'd live or die that you couldn't get with Batman and Superman and all the rest. They could hold hands during the big strategy meeting and the audience could say “aww!” Plus, cheap pathos when they think Scott is dead (but it turns out he escaped just in nick of time. Cue Barda, nobly trying to hold back tears, claiming she knew he wasn’t dead, and Scott squeezing her hand in tacit admission of how fucking close that was… see, ‘aww’?)

A Birds of Prey movie would also be nice. Okay, I'll shut up.

Oh, while I’m at it, seeing as how there probably isn’t going to be an Incredible Hulk sequel, but the Leader has already been established as a possible villain… make him the Big Bad in the Avengers movie. He’s a mastermind, so he can build robot armies or create gamma-radiated apes or whatever you need for the Avengers to fight, plus he could frame the Hulk for his crimes to get the Avengers together in the first place. Ka-ching.