Although director Bryan Singer opted not to helm the third episode in the hit X-Men film series (launched by 20th Century Fox with the eponymous X-Men in 2000), it was Singer’s youthful intelligence that brought exactly the right tone to the first two installments of Marvel’s top-selling franchise. A science fiction fan still in his mid-twenties when the project began in 1996, Singer was a product of the post-Alien, post-Terminator school of action/ adventure casting and, as such, was easily able to cope with the dominance of strong female leads in the X-Men universe. A good thing, too, because after racial tolerance and multicultural representation, the normalization of female dominance is the thing X-Men books became most famous for once Marvel put Chris Claremont in charge of scripting stories for this team of genetic mutants in 1975.

One of my favorite moments in director Bryan Singer’s X2: X-Men United (2003) is the scene where team members Storm and Jean Grey are sent to an abandoned church in Boston to capture a renegade mutant under suspicion of having just tried to assassinate the president. Two beautiful women, one a black “weather witch” and the other a white telepathic telekinetic, face down a blue-skinned male teleport who tries to scare them away by materializing in and out of view while making incoherent threats in German. Jean and Storm watch the show for a minute before Jean deadpans: “Are you bored yet?” “Oh yeah,” sighs Storm, as she lobs a low-watt charge of  …