Free Republic

Erin Perrine, who was the press communications director for former President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign, has joined a super PAC supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Perrine will be the communications director for the "Never Back Down" PAC, a group led by Trump-era top homeland security official Ken Cuccinelli. After her stint as the 2020 Trump campaign's national spokesperson, Perrine served as communications director for GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. ... Earlier this week, seasoned GOP strategist Jeff Roe was also brought on as an adviser to the super PAC, according to a Republican operative with direct knowledge of the move....

Have you heard of the “Magnetic Challenge?” No, it’s not some wacky teenage TikTok challenge, it’s actually much creepier. It all started as a rumor involving a microchipping conspiracy theory that involved the COVID-19 vaccine. It’s no secret that many people are leery about taking the vaccine for a number of reasons, namely because it hasn’t gone through the lengthy trials needed in order to receive FDA approval. However, a lot of folks are also convinced that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a sinister plot to microchip the masses. One of those conspiracy theories involves “magnetized proteins.” Here’s some...

An attorney for Hollywood director Bryan Singer announced Wednesday that the filmmaker will pay $150,000 to resolve allegations that he raped a 17-year-old boy while partying on a yacht in 2003. The "X-Men" director was accused of sexually assaulting then-underage Cesar Sanchez-Guzman during a Seattle yacht party. Singer allegedly lured him into a secluded area and forced the teen to perform oral sex. Sanchez-Guzman's lawsuit filed in December 2017 also alleges that Singer performed oral sex on the 17-year-old against his will and anally penetrated him, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Dark Phoenix was not the X-Men movie that moviegoers were looking forward to: Critics showed that with a 22% Rotten Tomatoes score, while audiences demonstrated that both in exits (B- CinemaScore, lowest ever for the franchise, and an awful 69% positive on PostTrak) and with their wallets, only spending $33M stateside, the lowest debut ever for the Fox/Marvel mutant franchise. Even though Dark Phoenix is the No. 1 winner around the globe with $140M –down substantially from the worldwide launches of X-Men: Days of Future Past ($262.9M), Logan ($247.4M) and X-Men: Apocalypse ($166.6M), finance experts tell us that the tale...

Is the name "X-Men" outdated? Marvel Studios' Executive Vice President of Production Victoria Alonso thinks so. During an interview about Captain Marvel's home video release, Alonso is asked about the future of the X-Men at Disney and goes on an interesting tangent. "I don't know where the future is going," Alonso told Nuke the Fridge. "Its funny that people call it the X-Men... there's a lot of female superheroes in that X-Men group; I think it's outdated."

Over the past two decades, Bryan Singer’s films—The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Superman Returns, four of the X-Men movies—have earned more than $3 billion at the box office, putting him in the top tier of Hollywood directors. He’s known for taking risks in his storytelling: It was Singer’s idea, for instance, to open the original X-Men movie with a scene at Auschwitz, where a boy uses his superpowers to bend the metal gates that separate him from his parents. Studio executives were skeptical about starting a comic-book movie in a concentration camp, but the film became a blockbuster and launched a...

It unfortunately didn’t take long for Fox’s X-Men series The Gifted to come back with another liberal pet issue. Last week's new year premiere gave us a Fox News-esque bad guy after the fall season's premiere provided a scene it thinks resembles an ICE raid. Now we’ve opened the “cop shooting an unarmed citizen” narrative with a bonus slam at “stand your ground” laws. The January 8 episode “meMento” follows two members of the vigilante anti-mutant hate group The Purifiers searching for loose mutant criminals. Following the mass prisonbreak of incarcerated mutants from the midseason finale, the group is more...

Legendary comic book writer and editor Len Wein has died. He was 69. Wein helped revive the “X-Men” franchise in 1975 with artist Dave Cockrum, creating characters including Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus and Thunderbird. A year earlier, in “The Incredible Hulk” #180, he debuted Wolverine, who eventually joined the “X-Men” team in later years.

In Indonesia, 212 is the number used to denote a specific mass protest from 2nd December last year. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims marched against the Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok, over allegations of blasphemy regarding his use of the Qu’ran in campaigning against opponents. The march was organised, in part, with the National Movement to Safeguard the Indonesian Ulema Council’s Fatwa. It was pretty hardline conservative and the protest demanded the government prosecute and jail Ahok based on the council’s fatwa, declaring him to be a blasphemer.

Wow! The trailer looks GREAT! Wolverine has a prodigy. Looks kick-@ss.

Fox has apologized for promoting X-Men: Apocalypse with images of Jennifer Lawrence's character Mystique being strangled by Oscar Isaac's Apocalypse with the tagline: "Only the strong will survive." "In our enthusiasm to show the villainy of the character Apocalypse we didn't immediately recognize the upsetting connotation of this image in print form," Fox said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter Friday. ... New York blogger EV Grieve posted a photo of the poster last month above a subway station in Manhattan that had been covered with eight pieces of paper that read: "This violence in my kid's face is...

Legendary X-Men character Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, is set to come out of the closet in a new issue of the “All-New X-Men” comic book series. In issue #40 of the comic book series, which features the superhero group’s travel back in time, Iceman admits to fellow superhero Jean Grey that he is gay after Grey tells him she can read his thoughts, according to ABC News.

As part of X-Men: Days of Future Past's target demographic — straight, white, male nerds, each with $10 to dispose of — I have about as much firsthand experience with oppression as I do fighting crime with big red lasers that shoot out of my fking eyeballs. But for years, oppression has been central to the way fans read — and watch — X-Men. Particularly during the '70s and '80s Chris Claremont-penned era of X-Men comics, the adventures of James "Logan" Howlett and co. were seen as analogous to the saga of those discriminated in the real world. Whole debates...

The mother of the alleged victim of a powerful Hollywood pedophile ring says she tried for years to interest the media in the story. Michael Egan’s mother Bonnie Mound said, “I wrote every news channel, every magazine, every talk-show host, everybody, from Oprah to ‘20/20’ to ‘60 Minutes’…. Nobody wanted to do anything because of the high-profile people involved.” One of those alleged “high-profile people” is defendant Bryan Singer, who is said to have “manipulated his power, wealth, and position in the entertainment industry to sexually abuse and exploit the underage Plaintiff [Michael Egan], “through the use of drugs, alcohol,...

Lawsuits alleging the sexual abuse of minors in a Hollywood pedophilia ring were filed in Hawaii Monday against three prominent Hollywood executives: David Neuman, Gary Goddard, and Garth Ancier. The suits were announced at the Four Seasons Hotel by Jeff Herman, the attorney representing Michael Egan, the man who alleges he was sexually abused by "X-Men" director Bryan Singer as a teen. Variety reports that: Ancier is the former president of BBC Worldwide America and headed the Fox entertainment group while Neuman is the former president of Disney TV. Goddard heads a design firm in Los Angeles which has created...

EXCLUSIVE: In the wake of shocking allegations of sexual abuse against Bryan Singer that surfaced five weeks before the launch of the new X-Men film, Singer has cancelled a scheduled appearance at this weekend’s WonderCon in Anaheim, Deadline hears. Fox instead will send Simon Kinberg as the studio prepares to launch the Singer-directed blockbuster X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Kinberg wrote and produced the film and has been a part of the X-Men universe since the beginning. Singer had been scheduled to be on hand to do interviews for the film that Fox opens May 23. It seems fairly obvious...

Famous Hollywood director Bryan Singer has been accused in a new federal lawsuit of sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy. The suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Hawaii, accused the 48-year-old “X-Men” filmmaker of first preying on the 15-year-old aspiring actor at a party at a California mansion where underage boys were plied with drugs and alcohol and taken advantage of. “The stories that I’ve heard of what went on at the estate are truly despicable,” the accuser’s lawyer, Miami attorney Jeff Herman, told the Daily News Wednesday night. Herman identified the accuser as Michael Egan III. Egan, who is...

Just a month before his next film X-Men: Days of Future Past is set to release, director Bryan Singer has been accused of child molestation. According to documents filed in Hawaii, 31-year-old Michael Egan claims Singer used his power in the entertainment industry to sexually exploit him when he was an underage teen actor striking it out in Los Angeles. Now Egan is suing the director, for $300,000 for the 'catastrophic psychological and emotional injuries' he says he suffered, the documents filed Wednesday explain.

The X-Men movie series, based on the comic books of the same name, is well-known for its unusual cast of gifted mutants and for its extraordinary special effects. What is not as widely known about the X-Men is the fact that the movies, along with the comic books, draw many clear parallels between the mutants and the gay and lesbian community. It is an open secret that the most recent movie in the series, “X-Men First Class,” which serves as the prequel for the other films, is especially overt in presenting these parallels. Zach Stenz, one of the First Class...

Already reported to have grossed $3.4 million in midnight runs at the domestic box office, “X-Men: First Class” is expected to rival opening figures close to “Batman Begins” and the first “X-Men” film, according to Twentieth Century Fox. If you’re into back-stories and reworked beginnings, Matthew Vaughn’s latest interpretation of a classic Marvel Comics series is sure to please. Exploring the origins of the relationship between Professor X and Magneto, the movie focuses primarily on the two archenemies, who were once the closest of friends, working together with other mutants to stop the greatest threat the human and mutant world...