‘To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’ Has an Excellent ‘X-Men’ Connection

Starting with A Christmas Prince over the holidays, Netflix has been on a real role in the romance department. The Kissing Booth, Set It Up, and now To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. The surprise hit has charmed approximately a bajillion Netflix subscribers, thanks in no small part to magnetic performances from leads Lana Condor and Noah Centineo. For X-Men fans like me (wow this seems like a sharp turn!), the success of To All The Boys is immensely awesome for a whole other set of reasons. That’s because the film gives Lana Condor the breakout moment she so deserves, and it’s the breakout moment she should have enjoyed two years ago!

Lana Condor made her acting debut in the 2016 superhero film X-Men: Apocalypse, not only a part in an installment of Fox’s flagship franchise but also in the spotlight role of Jubilee. If you grew up in the early ’90s watching the Saturday morning X-Men cartoon, you know who Jubilee is. She’s the rad mall babe with firework fingers that hurled zingers at bad guys while wearing a cool yellow trench coat and hot pink sunglasses. And as one of the very few, arguably most prominent Asian-American superheroes, she provided a very necessary bit of representation for generations. Jubilee was (and remains) the absolute coolest, and Lana Condor was absolutely perfect casting.

It’s just that… she didn’t get much to do! Fans absolutely flipped out when they saw early photos of Condor on X-Men: Apocalypse’s totally ’80s mall set, rocking the yellow and pink like her comic book counterpart. We were all then super bummed out when the movie came out and we all learned that most of the scenes starring the raddest mutant ever had been edited out of the ’80s-set film. What gives?!

That’s why Condor’s conquest feels so great in 2018, because she’s finally getting the attention her talent deserves. And if you’re now a big fan of Condor’s and totally missed her in X-Men: Apocalypse, there are actually some fun X-clips that you can watch right now that give you way more Condor content than the movie itself. First is the deleted mall sequence, a montage wherein Jubilee takes the new X-teens to the mall for some arcade action and recreational record shopping. This sequence will make you appreciate the brilliance of the one-hit wonder “The Safety Dance.”

Fox was also wise enough to make use of Condor’s bubbly personality in a bit of viral marketing, a retro-style TV commercial advertising Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Considering the success Condor’s had with TALBILB and her upcoming starring role in another comic adaptation, the Syfy action-thriller series Deadly Class, you gotta wonder if the brains behind the X-Men franchise aren’t kicking themselves for making room for Jubilee in Apocalypse and the next X-Men movie. Thankfully it looks like Condor’s kicked off her career on her own terms. If her star keeps rising, maybe we’ll eventually get the solo Jubilee film that you, me, she, we all want.

Where to stream To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Where to watch X-Men: Apocalypse