In the last few years, even big studio movies have been getting creative with their promotional material: creating false para-texts, tangentially related videos, fake news articles, even staged events in the media. X-Men: Days of Future Past takes it to a new level, all accesible from imdb.
Days of Future Past is about the X-Men we know travelling through time to communicate with their former, more handsome but equally talented selves to try and Save. The. World. With the classic mind-bend time travel movies present, Marvel and Fox have created a side narrative with a connection to the actual film that’s yet to be seen.
It’s a conspiracy theory: Magneto killed Kennedy. He’s the grassy knoll shooter, or better said, the grassy-knoll ‘bullet bender.’ A video on imdb has a short, 48 Hours style clip elucidating the tale and linking to a webpage. The site– this is where the really awesome part comes in– hosts a long, In Cold Blood-esque recounting of the conspiracy theory. It’s complete with McCarthy era Cold War references, fact-checks, and 80-year-old- Magneto interview frame narrative. It’s also actually pretty well written, fleshed out, and shows some engaged work on the studio’s end.
The exposé, which will take you about 20 minutes to read in full, is careful not to reveal too much about the movie. We can assume, though, that the present the X-Men live in is slightly different than the one we left off with in the last movies: the article quotes a fictional Kelly Seagle, Stanford Professor and “high-affect X-Gene Mutant. Under current law, Seagle must wear an Inhibitor Collar while she’s in approved locations beyond her approved internment camp.”
It also mentions “Division X,” so there’s some effort to pick up where the last movie, X-Men First Class, left off. Looks a lot better than the new Wolverine, in any case.
X-Men: Days of Future Past stars the whole gamut of the franchise’s stars. Michael Fassbender, Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy. Check out the page. It’s impressive.
