Released in 2006, "X-Men: The Last Stand" brought the original film trilogy to a conclusion, before multiple character spin-offs, a prequel reboot and various time-shenanigan cross-over sequels. While Bryan Singer successfully kicked off the franchise, he didn't have a clear idea for the third film, and instead jumped ship to work on "Superman Returns" instead, bringing with him his writers on "X2" and star James Marsden and editor/composer John Ottman as well. Multiple directors were looked at to replace him, with Brett Ratner eventually winning out. Ratner was unfamiliar with the material, and clearly was lacking the layered depth and sensitivity that Singer brought to the franchise, creating a film that is much less emotional or intelligent, but nevertheless amps up the scale of the action significantly and brings a much more colorful, comic-book tone to the series. The story involves Jean Grey's return as the darkly conflicted Phoenix, as well as a new mutant "cure" that is being developed, the threat of which Magneto uses to incite a war against the humans. Understandably, the film did not fare well with critics, but was still a blockbuster success, despite a mammoth budget.
Impressed by his work on the "Bourne" films, Ratner wanted John Powell to join the adventure. At the time, the English composer was mostly alternating between quirky animated films, comedies, and gritty action thrillers, and this score was perhaps his biggest score to date, delving into full-blown fantasy epic territory. Once again, Powell didn't carry over any direct thematic material from either Kamen or Ottman, but his score nonetheless fits in quite well with the previously established sound, with certain themes and ideas echoing what came before, but developing new material on a much grander scope. Powell brings a rousing new main theme for our heroes that gets more playtime over the course of the film than previous iterations (which also gets a heart-breaking Goldsmith-ian variation for the scenes of tragic reflection), a theme for Magneto and his brotherhood of mutants, a beautiful melody for the mutants' quest for freedom, a few action motifs, and topped off by a stunning theme for Phoenix that is a true belter. Powell adds in a massive choir and some deliciously dense and complex action writing, creating a wall of sound that is awesome to behold.
Varèse Sarabande released the score album, featuring just over an hour of music, with about an extra half hour of material unreleased officially. The original album cover is quite lackluster, and continues the trend of various fonts across the original trilogy, so I hope to bring some consistency there, as well as showcase some more interesting pieces of art. I present a total of twenty-two new covers to choose from. I couldn't really find any fan/commissioned pieces of art, so everything below is using official studio posters of different marketing material.
My first step was to clean up the title treatment, enhancing and matting out the title, and then overlaying a some extra brush metal texture to add a bit more detail to the low-rez images I found. I ended up just sticking with one font here, which should work across the series well enough, at least for the original three films.
I won't narrate every single piece, as there as too many. Several pieces required my usual AI enlarge/enhance tool to bring more sharpness and detail to older, low resolution images, and then the usual color tweaks to make things pop.
For a few pieces, I have to be quite aggressive with this process, trying to salvage some pieces that I could only find in super small sizes and low quality. For Cover 13 (the heroes facing off against the villains), the only original poster was only around 500px wide (and already quite grainy at that), and AI can only do so much, faces especially really become rather freakily mutated when significantly enlarging, which so little material to draw from. But this was a such cool poster, I didn't want to skip it. In the end, I ended creating two different renders, one which was 'accurate', but horrible noisy and gritty, and then one with looser settings, which began to make the faces unrecognizable, but which added a much sharper and cleaner look to other parts of the image (like clothes and background). I then blended between the two to try to bring out the best highlights throughout the image.
I did a similar process for Cover 15 (the villains in the forest). I again ended up blending two separate renders, mostly to soften the horrible noise that's created when you enlarge from such a tiny, pixelated image. Fortunately there was clearer faces to work with, minus a few slightly wonky eyes.
Covers 16 and 17 again were enhanced, the issue with having large group poses like that is that there is only so much face detail to work with, and the extrapolations become quite horrendous when you look up close. So in both images, I ended up having to cut out and overlay several of the character faces/bodies tracked from the other posters that were in better resolution. So technically, half of the people in the image have fairly clean faces, while others are a garbled mess if you look too closely. This kind of meticulous matching and blending can be quite a pain, but hopefully helps the image overall to read better. For 16, I also found a still of the Golden Gate bridge from the film that was used for the poster to try to restore the top of the image, matching it as best I could.
The final four covers use art developed for the Japanese poster campaign, shared online by an artist named Manabu Inada. Cover 22, the final piece, was the only one I was familiar with, but I ended up using several of his alternate poster pitches for the other pieces. It was interesting to see them developed multiple takes on the same elements, and ultimately I made my own tweaks based off of that material as well. Covers 19 and 21 were used mostly as-is. But Cover 20 took a significant amount of work. I actually toyed between this and another one of his alternates, both of which basically re-arrange the same basic elements: Wolverine, Angel, Storm and Jean Grey in solid red. I like that these posters have a totally different mood and color scheme than the other posters, but again needed to be edited to fit the space. For 20, I had to move Angel up, and then composite various bits of Logan from all the various alts to fill in the gaps created. Jean Grey I ended up shifting and enlarging significantly to fit into the top right corner, and then trying to blend everything together.
This was a fun project to work on, for a really fun score, though a few pieces were quite a pain in the neck. Hope you enjoy the results!
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