The trailer for "X-Men: First Class" landed today and immediately tilted the landscape of this summer's slate of superhero films -- if this smart, sleek and sinister trailer is representative of Matthew Vaughn's retro-mutant film as a whole, then it's suddenly unwise to view "First Class" as a second-class citizen compared with the two big Marvel Studios releases, "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "Thor."

The makers of the Fox film, however, say they never viewed the summer season as a competition against the Marvel films or Warner Bros.' "Green Lantern."



"You can never think about that," producer Bryan Singer said.  "That's just something you can torture yourself with or stress out about, but you can't do that and sit there and think, 'What are they doing? We need to do that.' That's the worst thing you can do. You have to make your own movie. It needs to exist in its own universe in terms of perception. Your goal is to make a cool movie. You need to stay focused on that goal."