X-Men Movies Viral Sites And Video Released

Two new viral marketing websites for the X-Men film franchises have gone live. The websites are for two organization who both claim to be working on a pro-mutant agenda, but seem to be at odds with each other.

The first website is for the Tandem Initiative. The website’s mission statement claims, “Inspired by the fast-growing population of Homo Sapiens Superior, we believe that studying the extraordinary abilities of the genetically gifted has the potential to assist humanity, as well as provide all genetically gifted individuals with a better understanding of their capabilities.”

The website, built as a Tumblr blog, encourages visitors share their gifts. There’s a page where you can view images of people sharing their gifts. It seems to be a mix of actual fans sharing their talents, and fictionalized characters. The website claims to be running a sweepstakes and includes images for the 2012 and 2013 winners, with the former showing off his abilities to control water, and the latter showing off her telekinesis.

The second website is for M-Underground, an organization who claims their only concern is dispelling the myth of the “mutant threat” and furthering the mutant cause. In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Magneto claims that President John F. Kennedy was a mutant. The website seems to be furthering a conspiracy theory called “The Kennedy Curse” that is trying to prove that many members of the Kennedy family were mutants, including Ted Kennedy. The website shows x-rays of Ted Kennedy’s body healing itself, and a teleprompter transcript of a 1978 DNC speech that would have outed Kennedy to the public.

There’s also a video that M-Underground claims to have hacked off of Tandem’s servers. It’s a short documentary of members of the scientific community discussing what kind of a threat mutants could be to humanity, which is seemingly at odds with Tandem’s mission statement.

The only way this makes sense is if Tandem is actually a cover for an anti-mutant organization. The organization is encouraging mutants to out themselves by sharing their mutant gifts. Perhaps this is a covert way for an organization, perhaps the government, to make a catalogue of known mutants and their abilities, similar to what the Mutant Registration Act sought to do. An M-Underground image released on the X-Men movies Twitter account (seen at the top of this page) seems to support that theory.

It’s unclear what this marketing is for, exactly. The next big ­X-Men film is X-Men:  Apocalypse, which is supposed to take place in 1980. All of the content from these websites, besides the DNC speech, is from present day, so it’s hard to see how they tie-in. It’s also pretty early for this kind of a advertising for a film that only just signed its director and is still almost two years out. It could be meant to hype up the Blu-ray release of Days of Future Past on October 14, though I don’t recall Tandem or M-Underground ever being mentioned in that film either.

Perhaps there’s more to come. We’ll have to wait and see.