Published Jun 16, 2026, 7:31 PM EDT
Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he’ll watch anything once. He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
Not many would go to bat for the disgraced director Bryan Singer, not even his longtime creative collaborator John Ottman. The composer-editor, who worked with Singer on several films and won an Oscar — rather controversially — for his work on the blockbuster biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, recently spoke about the disastrous production of their final X-Men movie together. Appearing on the Half the Picture podcast recently, Ottman said that Singer and the creatives behind the X-Men franchise were in a state of complacency following the success of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Widely considered to be one of the best superhero movies of the 2010s, the film was released to massive success in 2014. Ottman said that he would provide instant feedback while working on the edit of X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Simon Kinberg and his team of writers would implement his notes and shoot the necessary scenes. The movie barely had any reshoots because of how well-executed it was.
However, when the time came to work on X-Men: Apocalypse, Ottman said that his concerns about the script weren’t addressed immediately, and Singer was reportedly missing in action on occasion. Ottman said that the movie entered production without a firm third act in place, which caused massive logical gaps in its climax. He also had to juggle several characters, both new and old, and often found himself cornered. He said, “I was given the script, and I had pages and pages of notes. I see things that are going to blow up in my face. For my own sanity, I can’t let the script be the way it is. Then we go into production and we have no third act. It’s not unheard of, and I guess Marvel films that way, too. They have no ending and they just wing it. ”
Based on your answers, the Marvel hero who matches your spirit, values, and instincts has been revealed.
You carry the weight of the world on shoulders that are younger than they should have to be — funny, loyal, and endlessly self-sacrificing.
You fight in the shadows between law and chaos, guided by a fierce moral compass that refuses to let the guilty walk free.
Brilliant, driven, and occasionally insufferable — but always the person who solves the unsolvable problem.
You’ve been through fire that would break most people — and it did change you, completely. What’s left is unyielding, relentless, and operating by a code forged in grief.
Powerful, proud, and on a lifelong journey to become worthy of the legend you carry.
You believe in something bigger than yourself — and you fight for it even when the world has moved on and nobody else will.
Ottman said that the movie turned out okay, but people didn’t realize how hard it was to get it there. He explained, “So, a lot of the problems I thought were going to happen, they exploded in my face. For the third act, we were huddling with the team and the second unit director, and just coming up with s**t… Thank God for voice-overs… I don’t have good memories, but it’s also just a blur. It was a total, total, total nightmare to get that thing to where it was.” X-Men: Apocalypse brought back the cast of X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, while also introducing a new batch of younger characters. It grossed a little under $550 million worldwide against a budget of $178 million, and is now sitting at a 47% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The franchise came to an end after the very next installment, Dark Phoenix, tanked at the box office, though a full MCU reboot is in the works from Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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Bryan Singer, Simon Kinberg, Dan Harris, Michael Dougherty
Hutch Parker, Josh McLaglen, Lauren Shuler Donner, Stan Lee
Professor Charles Xavier
Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto
In the 1980s the X-Men must defeat an ancient all-powerful mutant, En Sabah Nur, who intends to thrive through bringing destruction to the world.