Superhero media typically follows a tried-and-true formula. There’s almost always a young person — or people — who discover they have abilities that set them apart from their peers. A bad guy will get hot on their trail for one reason or another, and the only thing that saves them is another superpowered being who is willing to take them under their wing and teach them the ropes. The first X-Men movie goes down that road with Rogue, who needs the help of Charles Xavier and his students to stop Magneto from turning the entire world into mutants. However, there’s a movie that came out before Fox’s first foray into the superhero genre that does the story better.
Before comic book movies were a known quantity, studios had to be careful about greenlighting them. One way to get around the roadblocks was to go the animation route, as that usually meant smaller budgets and less risk. Wildstorm Pictures saw enough in one of its properties, Gen¹³, to put it up against the likes of X-Men, which was already in production. While Gen¹³ didn’t find the kind of success its creative team was hoping for, it’s still an important footnote in comic book movie history that deserved better.
Unlike Rogue, Caitlin Fairchild is over the moon when she learns that there’s a spot for her at a mysterious school in Gen¹³. She doesn’t know what to expect, but she hopes her time there will shed more light on her father’s past and why he’s no longer in the picture. After meeting John Lynch, who was part of the Gen 12 project with her dad, she gets more than she bargained for when she starts displaying superpowers. It turns out that the headmasters of the school mean to take their students and turn them into weapons using genetic experiments. That doesn’t sit right with Lynch, Caitlin, or their new friends, Grunge and Roxy, so they fight back and expose the truth about the school’s operation.
By the end of the movie, the kids are in the clear, and Lynch offers to train them to be heroes. The journey won’t be easy because they aren’t the same people they were at the start of the movie, having endured numerous trials that have tested their resolve. They’re ready for the opportunity, though. Unfortunately, that was the last time Caitlin and her friends got a chance to jump off the page because plans for a follow-up to Gen¹³ fell apart, forcing one of the best-reviewed comic book movies of the pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe era into the forgotten pile.
Before Gen¹³ even released, director Kevin Altieri was singing its praises, explaining how it would embrace the mature themes of the source material. He also mentioned that, if everything went well, a TV show could be on the table that would continue Caitlin and Co.’s story. Of course, there is no such series, and that’s probably because the movie was never officially released in the United States. The Walt Disney Company wanted to make a live-action movie based on the property, so it agreed to give Gen¹³ a straight-to-video release. That didn’t come to pass, with Europe and Australia being the only places to see the final product, and while Disney never addressed the matter directly, the prevailing theory is that the company thought the movie’s content didn’t align with the brand.
A couple of decades make a big difference, because these days Disney is bankrolling all kinds of mature superhero projects. Just last year, Deadpool & Wolverine hit theaters and didn’t try to rein in the Merc With a Mouth, allowing him to crack numerous jokes not only about Marvel Studios but also about Disney. Since Wildstorm is now under the DC umbrella, Disney probably won’t get another bite of the apple, but maybe co-CEO of DC Studios James Gunn will. After all, he loves a group of rebels that want to dismantle the establishment, and that’s what Gen¹³ is all about.
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