Ti West said that Maxxxine was different from both of them

The Case For The X Franchise: A Case Study In The Late-Times And The Indirect Desperately Seeking MaXXXine

Maxxxine is the end of the story. The franchise is still being discussed by West with some ideas for where it should go. There is one key difference this time: he might actually take a break. To get the snowball rolling on whatever he wants to be next, he would like to take a little vacation before jumping into it.

That was how he found out about the franchise’s unique naming scheme. When he started working on the later films, the original idea was to follow X with XX and finish it in XXX. “Once I wrote Pearl, it was clear this movie should be called Pearl,” he explains, adding that “by some miracle, Maxine has an X in her name, so we could just add Xs. I don’t know what we would’ve called it if she didn’t have an X in her name.”

The first two films are the same as the accompanying pieces. Mia Goth is in both sets and she is the only one. In Pearl, she’s the titular villain, and in X, she plays both an aged Pearl and Maxine, the sole survivor of the elder’s latest massacre. The films are different but they all have the same plot, location, and cast. West had a lot of ideas for a trilogy, but didn’t really commit to writing until he realized the next movie was a foregone conclusion.

MaXXXine’s explicit eroticism juxtaposed with its frequent shots of protesting conservative evangelists often makes the film feel like the X franchise’s most direct commentary on / response to Hollywood’s present-day aversion to sex. The feature played like a coked-up tribute to the year itself, with all its paranoia and B-horror projects, when it was set in 1985 and specifically setting MaXXXine in that year.

Thanks to an unflappable work ethic and the constant support of her crooked agent, Maxine has made it to the big time in Los Angeles, six years after narrowly escaping with her life. In a town full of newly minted blondes hungry for big breaks, neither Maxine’s thick accent nor her willingness to show skin is quite enough to make her stand out — especially for bigger-budget projects that aren’t just about people having sex. After watching her auditioning for the horror film The Puritan II, Elizabeth Bender was convinced that she had found the star she was looking for.

You can feel West channeling the sexiness of dramas like Flashdance and the grimy glamour of neo-noirs like Body Double as Maxine rushes from her gigs at a strip joint to rehearsals on set. With that said, MaXXXine’s world is larger and more intricate than that of either Pearl or X, and Goth’s performance makes Maxine feel almost like a different character. West also uses this newly added space to paint a picture of LA (the city) at its sleaziest and emphasize how the US’s Ronald Reagan-era political conservatism had a transformative effect on the era’s larger pop cultural landscape.