Losing the X Factor: is it time for the X-Men universe to stop expanding?

When James Franco entered talks to play superhero Multiple Man in an upcoming movie, we can only imagine the actor, director, screenwriter, musician and poet saw the character as a metaphor for his own creative endeavours. For Marvel mutant James Madrox was named for a useful ability to duplicate himself countless times over, meaning he is capable of living scores of lives all at once.

Hence, one Multiple Man can spend decades learning Shaolin kung fu, while another can study for a law degree, all while the main Multiple Man goes about his daily superhero business. Eventually these “dupes” are (usually) reabsorbed back into the original Multiple Man, resulting in useful new skills for Madrox Prime, but occasionally they crop up years later to cause trouble for their clone daddy.

Likewise, it is rather tempting to imagine Franco frowning at the memory of the time one of his forgotten Franco dupes turned up unexpectedly in General Hospital, or appeared as the second Green Goblin in superhero dud Spider-Man 3. Can this really be the same accomplished indie actor who played Sean Penn’s on-off lover in the wonderful, Oscar-winning biopic Milk, or who directed himself as Tommy Wiseau in the acclaimed story of the so-called “worst film ever made”, The Disaster Artist? Perhaps there really is an army of Franco clones out there, allowing the actor to teach classes at a New York University while simultaneously running his own production company, hosting the Oscars and recording albums for his own English new wave–themed pop duo.

The very existence of a Multiple Man movie also reminds us that the X-Men universe itself is exploding into myriad new forms like a mogwai in a shower who’s just been fed several Big Macs long after midnight. Next year’s big mutant movies are a mixed bunch: X-Men: Dark Phoenix will revisit the famous comic book storyline in which Jean Grey loses her powers, while Josh Boone’s The New Mutants will further push the envelope by segueing into psychological horror. Elsewhere on the big screen, Bryan Singer’s mainstream saga has been all the way back to the 1960s, swapped its cast for younger models and subsequently zoomed forward in time to both the 1980s (X-Men: Apocalypse) and the late 2020s (this year’s Logan).

Deadpool, one assumes, operates in the present day, though it barely matters given the meta-tastic filter that has been applied, and the loose (to say the least) connection between Tim Miller’s movie – an untitled sequel is also due next year –and any of the other films. Likewise, FX’s Legion might be about a mutant who is the psychologically challenged son of Professor X in the comics, but you’d hardly know it.

The latest TV series to spin off from the X-Men is Fox’s The Gifted, which focuses on a mother and father (True Blood’s Stephen Moyer and Joss Whedon regular Amy Acker) who are forced to go on the run after their teenage children begin exhibiting dangerous mutant powers. Again, the show is supposedly part of the same universe as the X-Men movies, but is conveniently set in an alternate timeline where the costumed mutants have disappeared – so don’t expect Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy to turn up any time soon with sage words of follically challenged wisdom.

This time around, creator Matt Nix has chosen to hark back to the early X-Men movies, back before Brett Ratner was handed the keys to the kingdom on X-Men: The Last Stand and it was still possible to see mutant powers as an intelligent pop culture metaphor for queer identity, or simply being different. But the new show doesn’t stop there. Possession of the mutant gene is also not-so-subtly compared to the African American experience in times of slavery. The underground network of sympathisers that exists to get mutants over the border to Mexico recalls the historical Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape to free states and Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries. One has to wonder if Nix and his team would have been better off creating a single well-honed allegory to a historical example of institutionalised prejudice, rather than choosing to borrow from every example under the sun.

Moreover, I can’t be alone in wondering if all these myriad X-Men shows and movies will ever be reunited into one great X-Universe with a single tone and timeline, or if they ever could be. In the original Marvel comics, part of the fun (as in the Marvel shows and movies) is that you never know when household names such as Spider-Man or the Hulk might turn up at the X-Mansion to borrow some sugar. Likewise, the best Multiple Man stories were those in which Madrox came into contact with one of his long-lost “dupes”, and either gained a useful skill upgrade or found that he had inadvertently fathered several new sprogs.

As long as the X-Men universe keeps expanding in so many diverse ways, it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see its many offspring reabsorbed back into the whole. And there is also a sense of ever-diminishing returns here. For when dozens of duplicates all operate under a single guise, as Multiple Man could have warned us, there is no guarantee they will all retain the qualities that made us warm to the original in the first place. Haven’t they seen Gremlins?