In a brief, new interview with Access Hollywood (embedded below), The Wolverine star Hugh Jackman told the newsmagazine show that he believes Bryan Singer doesn’t get enough credit for “inventing” the superhero genre, and that he thinks Singer will break new ground again by being one of the only directors ever to get progressively better throughout the course of a three-part series.It’s common, after all, for the second movie to be better than the first–X2: X-Men United joined films like The Empire Strikes Back for that–but as often as not (we’re looking at you, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman and Blade!), the third movie falls off the ledge. Offhand, there’s at least Lord of the Rings and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset/Sunrise/Midnight trilogies that a case could be made got progressively better. But generally speaking, he’s onto something…Here’s the quote, for those outside the U.S. who can’t view the video:”I know, having sat at Comic-Con on that panel with that amazing cast–I keep saying it’s like two movies in one but the size of it, it’s like three in one! [It’s] going to blow people away because the story – Bryan Singer is going to be the first director to make increasingly better movies in a franchise, I’m not sure if there’s anyone else that’s done it,” Jackman said, adding, “Few people credit Bryan for what he deserves credit for, which is really inventing that genre. There wasn’t really a superhero genre before X-Men came out. Funny enough, I remember catching a plane while we were promoting The Prestige with Chris Nolan, he said to me that he’d always had the Batman in his mind. Even way back before 2000, he had the version of Batman that he ended up making in his head. He said, ‘when I went into the cinema and saw X-Men, I said damn, that’s my idea.’ The idea that you could really dive in to the emotional life, to the vulnerability of these characters and that, as well as being fantastical, amazing and action, is what’s going to hook people and make them care. That’s what Bryan did; he had a lot of courage to do that.”
