We Need Mister Sinister in the ‘X-Men’ Movies Already
Magneto, when the villain mood strikes, wants to rule humanity to put a stop to their oppression of his kind. Apocalypse wants to push mutants to be strong, to eliminate weakness, to ensure that when the time comes to wage war against humanity, they will win. Mystique is purely in it for herself, but still usually finds a way to spin her actions as “for the betterment of her kind.” Most of the major X-Men villains are acting on behalf of their people, they are barely villains in concept, and that’s a major reason why almost none of them stay villains. It’s tough to villainize an oppressed group seeking justice. And then there’s Mister Sinister, one of the greatest villains in X-Men history, who cares about absolutely none of that.
I think that James Gunn’s Superman, which doesn’t offer so much as a moment of empathy for unhinged billionaire tech bro Lex Luthor, is a great reminder of the effectiveness of a truly villainous villain, an evil lunatic who is fun to watch but in a way where you still root for the heroes to beat the living crap out of them. It would be a notable change of pace for the X-Men franchise and a terrific way to establish a new tone in a new universe. It would be especially rewarding because Sinister was a character heavily teased by the previous series of X-Men movies, who never actually appeared in a single one of them.
This probably won’t seem like a big deal for most people, as most people generally aren’t aware of who the character is. The MCU did a fantastic job of setting up Thanos as a villain that people outside the comics were not familiar with, but became familiar with simply through the leg work done by the films to establish him as a serious threat. Unfortunately, the X-Universe never quite nailed that down. Part of that is a good thing. These movies were much more standalone than the Marvel ones. There are references made in X-Men: Apocalypse, Logan, Deadpool 2, etc. but not on the same level of what people genuinely find in an MCU movie. The references aren’t there to establish continuity between the two, if anything, they’re made in order to distance one thing from another.
Because of that, it’s harder to build up a villain over multiple movies. There were four films in a row that the Essex name has appeared in. But people never really picked up on it. In X-Men Apocalypse, the name of the Essex Corporation is introduced in a post-credits sequence, when they show up at the Weapon X lab to retrieve a sample of Wolverine’s blood. That tease is slightly fulfilled in Logan, when it is revealed that the Essex Corporation used that blood to create a clone of Wolverine, Laura Kinney. Deadpool 2 names a nefarious orphanage that runs illegal experimentation on mutants after Essex as well. The New Mutants is by far the worst offender on this topic, as the man himself is running the institution in which our main characters are housed, is effectively responsible for everything that happened in the movie, and still never appears.
What does “Essex” even mean and why do we care? Well, it’s derived from Nathaniel Essex, the real name of longtime X-Men villain Mister Sinister. That might not mean much on paper, but Sinister is one of the most fascinating, endearing and above all different X-Men villains ever created. Most adversaries in the X-Men films fall into one of two categories, they’re either people who fight for mutant superiority without realizing the extreme lengths to which they’ve gone (Magneto, Sebastian Shaw, Apocalypse) or they’re bigoted humans who believe in exterminating mutants, enslaving them or generally treating them as less than human (William Stryker, Bolivar Trask). As great as these films can be, that sameness becomes extremely evident over the course of eleven movies.
But Mister Sinister is a completely different character, in terms of his goals. Even more importantly, he’s a character that fully bridges those two mentalities. Here’s a human being who, like so many others, conducts horrific experiments on mutants, but who at the same time is working toward a goal of mutant superiority. He’s a mess of conflicting ideals and those almost always result in fascinating characters, if treated right.
First, let’s actually look at who this character is. Nathaniel Essex originally hails from Victorian London (which would make for fantastic flashbacks) a scientist and Darwinist from a time long before Darwin’s theories were accepted as the norm. He is dedicated to the concept of evolution and immediately recognizes the signs of evolution in the mutants he comes across in his travels, long before knowledge of mutants was even made public. Essex is in many ways the Victor Frankenstein of the X-Men franchise. He believed his peers were shackled by morality.
Essex would find young mutants who no one would miss (not tough as almost all of them were outsiders, most living as circus freaks) and bring them back to his lab, experimenting on them to test the limits of their mutations, as well as simply opening them up to see how they worked. He named these mutations in the DNA “Essex Factors” after himself, which means that the name of the X-Factor gene and therefore the ‘X’ in X-Men in general all stem from Sinister originally.
What makes Sinister such an interesting character is not that he was a Frankensteinian psychopath who experimented on mutants, nor his fascination with them, but his sheer envy. This is a man who wanted to be a mutant so badly that he experimented on himself, turning himself into a mutant, constantly updating himself, becoming an incredibly powerful and vicious monster in the process. That was, after all, the point. Chris Claremont, the man responsible for so many beloved X-Men characters and storylines, said that he based Sinister off of what he imagined it would look like if the embodiment of a child’s nightmare simply sprang to life.
Those elements basically result in the Mister Sinister we know and love. A deranged Darwinist in origin, Sinister first looked like a goth Arnold Schwarzenneger before taking on the appearance of a vampiric Lord Byron. He’s vain and prissy, but calculating and cold, genuinely malevolent, but there was once a deep and sincere humanity to him that allows him to still maintain a sense of tragedy, but in an endearingly pathetic way. It’s a distant memory of inner turmoil, at best, no doubt seen as a weakness he’s evolved beyond. That’s the beauty of Sinister, though. His lack of turmoil only highlights the worst traits of the characters around him, because Sinister wears those traits on his sleeve, and is so unapologetically what he is. He never has a moment’s doubt about what he is doing.
Sinister could come in at any time. There’s no need to wait and yet the films kept haphazardly teasing him — even in a couple of great movies, granted — for no real reason at all. It never felt like there was an actual game plan. It felt like they kept making the decision to introduce him and then changing their minds at the last second. And as someone who loves and hates this character deeply and dreams of seeing him actually make it to the screen, that would be such a sad place to wind up.
Sinister is an obsessive character by nature. It’s his obsession with genetics and mutation that caused his transformation in the first place. But it could also be used as an interesting tool to almost make the character a stand-in for the worst side of fandom, because sometimes that’s what it feels like. In essence, Sinister is the ultimate toxic fanboy. He’s someone who is so entrenched in this world, a world that doesn’t necessarily belong to him — when you look at it, he basically appropriated being a mutant — and to which he feels nonetheless entitled. Anyone is welcome to appreciate mutant culture, but Sinister feels an unfounded ownership of it. He is literally on some Get Out shit, and as such would be a weird, creepy and bizarrely timely villain, the likes of which we certainly haven’t seen before in an X-Men movie.
He has even spent much of his life devoted to obsessing over a single relationship. Sinister is singularly focused on the pairing of Cyclops and Jean Grey and the potential genetic offspring that the two of them could create. All he wants is to see those two together, to see the Summers bloodline thrive, to the point where he basically creates their future son, Cable, as his OC, his living fan-fiction. Mister Sinister is Tumblr made flesh. He’s devoted his life to scribbling Scott/Jean fan fiction on the strands of actual human DNA.
There is so much potential for Sinister on the big screen and it would be great if the team behind the hypothetical, eventual X-Men rbeoot would take note of that. This is a twisted, vain, eccentric and genuinely scary character who deserves a shot at the spotlight. If they actually are working toward introducing him in the right way, more power to them and I can’t wait. But if an introduction was already planned and scrapped, it just seems like the love for the character isn’t there, or at the very least, that they don’t understand why he might be so important.
I have no doubt that there are going to be fantastic X-Universe films to come. That’s been promised already, even if we’ve yet to move away from the original cast and see a full-blown MCU reboot. Given that Sinister appeared as a secondary antagonist in the hugely successful X-Men ’97, I’m holding out some hope that he’ll eventually get his cinematic due. But if Mister Sinister doesn’t factor into the plan, I guess I’ll live. I already have to walk into each of these movies by giving myself an anti-pep talk and saying “Hey, he’s never gonna be there, it’s not going to happen, so just get excited for the things you are going to see.”
But I still can’t help but feel like there’s a wealth of promise and potential in this one character that, if handled right, could take any of these connected properties in a bold and refreshing direction.
