User blog comment:LoveWaffle/2014 Preview/@comment-6731922-20140115002940/@comment-1895174-20140120032946

TASM2 for sure.

I mean, yeah, on paper DoFP has more characters, but what matters is how they're used in the story. It's becoming clearer with each piece of news about the movie that the Future part is going to be fairly small, more of a framing device than anything, and that the majority of the movie will come down on the Past part. Patrick Stewart being the only one stuck in the Future who's all that prominent. So that leaves us with McAvoy's Xavier, Fassbender's Magneto, Wolverine, Beast, Mystique, Quicksilver, and New Trask will be the ones who really matter. That's actually a really small cast for an X-Men movie.

TASM2 has to handle three different villains. Different being the operative word, since they don't come together as a single unit. The original X-Men technically had four villains (five if you want to count Sen. Kelly), but it's not a narrative burden on the movie because the four of them come together as the Brotherhood. They all have the same goals and work in unison with each other to achieve those goals. I'd argue the Brotherhood as an entity is the main villain of the movie, and that the four who make it up are just cogs in its machine. Magneto's just the more important cog. That can be applied several other times: Thor: The Dark World does not have two different villains, it has the Dark Elves; Iron Man 3 does not have several different villains, it has AIM; X-Men: First Class does not have five different villains, it has the Hellfire Club; etc.

TASM2 does not have that kind of set-up. It may have Oscorp connecting the three characters, but Electro and Rhino are more pawns than cogs; independent entities who are manipulated by Oscorp rather than members of an organization acting as part of it. Structurally, TASM2 looks like Spider-Man 3. You have multiple, independent villains, the returning cast of supporting characters, and a few new supporting roles on top of that. While I like Spider-Man 3 more than I would say most people do, I can't deny that its overstuffed cast is it's biggest flaw and why it is easily the weakest of the Raimi movies.