With “Deadpool and Wolverine” breaking box office records, “X-Men 97” winning over critics and audiences on Disney+ and Marvel Studios on the precipice of a full-blown live-action reboot, everything is coming up “X-Men.”
It’s easy to overlook the fact that “X-Men,” released in 2000, effectively kicked off the era of the modern superhero movie. It proved that you could take oversized characters and make them relatable and fun for modern audiences. And they have continued to delight ever since.
So, to celebrate our favorite mutants (and the milestones “Deadpool and Wolverine” are gamely crossing almost daily), we thought we’d rank every single “X-Men” movie, from the superpowered to the woefully underwhelming.
SNIKT!
14. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (2009)
After the initial trilogy of movies, Fox decided to try and expand the “X-Men” universe. There were going to be a whole suite of “X-Men Origins” movies. In fact, some of the planned Magneto movie got folded into “X-Men: First Class” (more on that in a minute), while others were just abandoned completely. An early, R-rated script by “Game of Thrones” co-creator David Benioff was heavily reworked by Skip Woods at the behest of studio executives and director Gavin Hood, coming off the Oscar-nominated “Tsotsi,” was hired to direct.
The resulting feature is an unmitigated disaster that speeds through Logan’s (Hugh Jackman) backstory, his relationship with his brother Sabretooth (Liev Schreiber) and his transformation into Wolverine. Add to that the clunky introduction of several key X-universe heroes and villains, including the introduction of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, and sprinkle in some historical context, and you’ve got a big old mess. (For some reason the climax is set during the Three Mile Island nuclear plant disaster.)
The movie is poorly shot and staged, with unfinished-looking visual effects and a plot that just thuds from one scene to the next with little conviction. It’s a dreary mess of a movie, whose release was marred by a leak that saw the whole movie show up online (and led to one critic’s dismissal for reviewing a pirated copy). The less said about “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the better.
13. “X-Men: The Last Stand” (2006)
“X-Men: The Last Stand” is when stuff really started skidding sideways. And it was only three movies in! Original director Matthew Vaughn, who also worked on the script, departed last minute (more on him in a minute), leaving Fox scrambling to replace him. They settled on Brett Ratner, who is now persona non grata but was then known as the director of the “Rush Hour” movies.
Ratner squanders all the goodwill from “X2,” along with the cliffhanger ending, instead creating a noisy collection of disjointed scenes that don’t amount to much. (There were three credited editors working around the clock to get this thing ready for its summer 2006 release. That means there were at least a half-dozen actually working on the movie.) Instead of giving us a proper version of the Dark Phoenix saga, something that was teased at the end of “X2” and a storyline familiar to most through the 1990s animated series, “The Last Stand” is content to have the Dark Phoenix be one of a number of storylines fighting for supremacy (there’s also something about a mutant “curse” and several new characters who are introduced and developed).
This is a movie that starts with the death of Professor X and Cyclops and then builds to a clumsily photographed battle on Alcatraz. Painfully forgettable.
12. “The New Mutants” (2020)
Whew boy. The first trailer for “The New Mutants,” which was meant to open up a new avenue of X-storytelling with a more horror-focused vibe, was released back in 2017, on October 13, a Friday. It was meant to be released the following spring. But the Disney acquisition of Fox and a seemingly unending series of reshoots delayed the movie until late summer 2020, you know a typically wonderful time to go to the movies.
While the movie seemed to have a lot going for it – direction from Josh Boone who was coming off “The Fault in Our Stars,” a starry young cast led by Anya Taylor-Joy, cinematography by “Evil Dead 2” legend Peter Deming – but ultimately none of that mattered thanks to a nonsensical plot involving alternate dimensions and a demonic bear and a scaled back setting that was meant to be intimate and claustrophobic but just came across as cheap. If you saw this movie and remember anything about it, you should be commended. Your mutant superpower has been revealed.
11. “Dark Phoenix” (2019)
“The New Mutants” wasn’t the only casualty of Disney’s absorption of the 21st Century assets. They were also saddled with “Dark Phoenix,” the fourth film in the series of prequel movies with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (among others). Set in the 1990s, so, right before the events of the original “X-Men,” this recounts the Dark Phoenix storyline in an even looser way. (It negates the events of “X-Men: The Last Stand,” we suppose? But that could be true of everything that came after “X-Men: The Last Stand.”)
Sophie Turner was introduced as the new, young Jean Grey, who once again becomes possessed with almost infinite power, leading to some very tough decisions from the rest of the X-Men. Simon Kinberg, who had written on several of the other movies, also directs this time, without much success. Once again, the production was befallen by competing corporate priorities, copyright issues (initially, the Skrulls were part of the storyline) and an endless series of test screenings and reshoots.
The end result feels like something neither fish nor fowl, although there is a cool train sequence towards the end and a lot of scenery chewing by a villainous Jessica Chastain. (She’s an evil alien, of course.) This doesn’t add anything to the already confusing timeline and felt like a lot of effort, mostly in securing the deals for actors who had agreed to a three-picture pact, for no payoff.
10. “X-Men: Apocalypse” (2016)
“X-Men: Apocalypse” is such a baffling misfire that Oscar Issac, who played the titular bad guy, still seems bewildered by the experience all these years later. If there is a reason to watch “X-Men: Apocalypse,” then it is for the sequence where Quicksilver (Evan Peters) saves the rest of the X-Men — and indeed the whole of Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters — while “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics blares across the soundtrack. (It directly follows an “X-Men go to the mall” scene, which is also pretty good.) It’s a genuinely incredible sequence, building on the “Ship in a Bottle” scene from “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and overcoming occasionally chintzy visual effects, for a moment that makes you want to pump your first. It also makes you wish the rest of the movie that surrounded the sequence was better. Ah, 1980s “X-Men.” You could have been so cool.
9. “Deadpool” (2016)
It’s a miracle that “Deadpool” exists at all, much less that it became a multibillion-dollar franchise. Ryan Reynolds had wanted to revisit the character after his weird introduction in “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” which included him appearing with his mouth sewed shut. He tried to convince Fox executives, who politely demurred. Then he shot some test footage with director Tim Miller, an animator who had worked on the titles for David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” It still didn’t move the needle. Mysteriously, that footage leaked online and the overwhelming response led Fox to greenlight the actual movie. (You can still find that test online and it is shocking how similar it is to the final movie.)
On a budget of less than $60 million, it made almost $800 million, which is just incredible. Finally, Reynolds had found the franchise he was born for. Miller and Reynolds worked economically and effectively. The movie is really a couple of big set pieces and a bunch of smaller scenes that string those set pieces together. But the movie is really charming, has a ton of heart and is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps most importantly, that first “Deadpool” showed that the boundaries of mainstream superhero movies could be moved and shoved and stabbed with a samurai sword through the chest.
8. “Deadpool 2” (2018)
When Reynolds and original director Tim Miller clashed over the direction of the sequel, Reynolds brought in David Leitch, who at that time had co-directed the first “John Wick” and directed “Atomic Blonde” solo. It turned out to be an inspired choice. “Deadpool 2” is more of a muscular action movie than the first film, in the same way that “Beverly Hills Cop II” bumped up the action. It’s also much more complicated, from a storytelling standpoint, with a time-traveling villain named Cable (Josh Brolin), who has made his way to Deadpool’s world to murder a young mutant that is, one day, responsible for the death of Cable’s family. Yes, we are very much in “Terminator” territory here.
All of the hallmarks of the first movie – the fourth-wall-breaking comedy, the somewhat melancholic tone, the bloody violence – return, but in ways that are bigger, better and more complex. And as much of a success as “Deadpool 2” was, both commercially (it again almost made $800 million) and creatively, you can feel the story struggling to be bigger, for Deadpool to finally join the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which at this point was consuming all media. He’d get his chance, but it would take a few more years and a giant corporate merger to make it happen.
7. “Deadpool & Wolverine” (2024)
“Deadpool & Wolverine” does the thing that would have never been possible without a corporate merger – it sends the Merc with a Mouth (once again played by Ryan Reynolds) into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And not only that, but he’s bringing along Logan, aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), for the ride, somewhat negating the tragic conclusion of “Logan.” The result is a hoot, full of cameo appearances, meta in-jokes and other buffoonery.
Director Shawn Levy, a longtime Reynolds collaborator, doesn’t add much visual flair to the proceedings. In fact, it’s a huge step down from the set pieces David Leitch commanded for “Deadpool 2”. But he does get some of the quieter scenes right, making sure that the mixture of spectacle and more emotional moments is just right. The plot involves Deadpool and Wolverine attempting to save Deadpool’s world from deletion by the Time Variance Authority (from “Loki”). It’s a great set-up and the resulting movie is a great MCU buddy comedy, full of extreme violence, plenty of profanity and general wackiness.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” fully integrates Deadpool into the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it’s still not clear how he would integrate into something like an “Avengers.” But hey, Deadpool is nothing if not unpredictable.
6. “X-Men: Days of Future Past” (2014)
Co-writer Matthew Vaughn said he wanted “X-Men: Days of Future Past” to be the third film in the new trilogy, with a film in between “X-Men: First Class” and this film. But when he showed the script to Fox executives, they loved it so much they wanted it to be the second film. Vaughn got anxious and left, leaving their script to be heavily rewritten by Simon Kinberg. Fox, in their infinite wisdom, called in Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two movies. The resulting movie, based on a beloved comic book arc, smashes the younger characters from “X-Men: First Class” together with the characters from Singer’s films — which is a little weird, that we’re already going back to the old cast after a single (awesome) movie.
When the movie came out, it was largely applauded as one of the best comic book movies ever and certainly the best “X-Men” movie. While that isn’t the case, it is an enjoyable film that, every once in a while, outdoes itself. In a grim, post-apocalyptic future, mutants are hunted down and put into cages by a new generation of Sentinel. The surviving X-Men use Kitty Pryde (a great Elliot Page) to send Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to stop the creation of the Sentinels in the 1970s and end the terror that the future X-Men are suffering.
Both “Terminator”-y and unnecessarily convoluted, it’s still fun to see both of the casts in the same movie (sometimes sharing the same scene) and it’s also nice to hear John Ottman’s “X-Men” theme from “X2” return. Given what we’ve learned about Singer and his frequent absences, the movie’s somewhat stilted, uneven quality is easier to explain. If Vaughn and his co-writer Jane Goldman had stayed on, it could have been cream-of-the-crop type stuff. But that’s in a version of history that doesn’t exist.
5. “The Wolverine” (2013)
“The Wolverine” survived a fascinating production history, originally meant as a more stripped-down samurai film, written by Christopher McQuarrie and directed by Darren Aronofsky. When both moved on, they were replaced by James Mangold, who oversaw a script by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank. And while not as exceptional as McQuarrie and Aronofsky promised to be, “The Wolverine” is still pretty fun.
For one, this version was dialed back to a PG-13 rating. And there are several more outwardly “comic book-y” flourishes that do a big disservice to the main story, which involves Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) being summoned to Japan by a man whose life he had saved in World War II. The old man promises to make Wolverine, haunted by the death of Jean Grey, a mortal man, offering him the sweet embrace of death. Wolverine is intrigued! Of course, then things go a little sideways.
Mangold stages and directs the action competently and even handles the sillier elements, like a poisonous snake woman and a climactic battle with a guy in a big silver robot suit, with aplomb. There’s also that great sequence on top of the bullet train, which really does kick ass. Yes, you wish there was a little more bite (and there is an alternate R-rated cut), but you can feel where Mangold and Jackman are headed with “Logan.” And as far as stepping stones go, this is plenty entertaining.
4. “X-Men” (2000)
The one that started it all. At the time, comic book movies were barely on the map. Sure, there had been the “Batman” movies that began with Tim Burton’s all-timer, but the “Superman” movies were long in the rearview and there were only oddities like “Blade,” released two years earlier, that dotted the landscape. Sam Raimi’s seismic “Spider-Man” was even a couple of years off. If you want to talk about the birth of the modern superhero movie, look no further than “X-Men.”
By all accounts the production was a nightmare. The script saw a revolving door of screenwriters come and go (among them: Joss Whedon, Christopher McQuarrie, Ed Solomon and Andrew Kevin Walker), Hugh Jackman was cast during production after Dougray Scott got held up on the set of “Mission: Impossible 2,” and the schedule was extremely tight. Honestly, the movie feels a little misshapen and half-baked, occasionally coming across as outright embarrassed by its comic book origins — Singer would always bring up Magneto and Professor X as stand-ins for Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
At 104 minutes, “X-Men” introduces a lot of concepts, from Magneto’s childhood in an internment camp during World War II to Xavier’s mansion in upstate New York where he teaches the mutants, along with a villain plot that sees Magneto wanting to turn regular humans into mutants (the audacity!) Add to that pile-up origin stories for Wolverine and Rogue (Anna Paquin) and it’s a lot. “X-Men” is still pretty cool, even if the cinematography is unnecessarily muddy and the visual effects are only okay (we’re going to say that was a combination of nascent computer-generated images and the extreme time crunch to complete production). We wouldn’t still be talking about the “X-Men” movie franchise, nearly 25 years later, if the first movie hadn’t hit so hard.
3. “X2” (2003)
Bryan Singer had more control over the sequel film, and the film feels more controlled and more confident. “X2” opens up the world of the mutants, with Wolverine (Jackman) looking for clues to his past and a new threat revealed in the form of William Stryker (Brian Cox), a government official with dreams of genocide. Some of the very best set pieces in the entire franchise are in this film, including a wonderful cold open that has Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) attempting to assassinate the president, Magneto’s escape from his prison cell and a sequence where Pyro (Aaron Stanford) confronts the local police. This entry double-underlines the allegorical underpinnings of “X-Men,” with Singer drawing from his experiences as a young gay man.
Not all of the changes are for good – the multiple storylines mean less time with our X-Men together, and John Ottman’s music, beyond his “X-Men” theme, is mostly forgettable and a downgrade from Michael Kamen’s underrated score for the original. At the end of “X2,” Singer pointed to where he was going with the franchise, with a glimpse of the Dark Phoenix. (Singer departed for Warner Bros. and DC, where the handed him the keys to their marquee character with “Superman Returns.”) And, again, knowing now about Singer’s frequent truancy, it’s unclear where the praise for “X2” should be placed. Whoever was responsible did a tremendous job.
2. “Logan” (2017)
“Logan” seemed like the movie that would never happen. But enough goodwill built up over the years that Fox finally allowed Hugh Jackman to make his brutal, R-rated Wolverine movie. Inspired, in part, by Mark Millar’s “Old Man Logan” series, “Logan,” which reunited Jackman with James Mangold, takes place in a dusty future world. Not the dystopian future world of “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” mind you, but still, pretty bad.
Logan is working as a limo driver in El Paso, looking after Professor X (Patrick Stewart, in the best performance of the entire franchise), who struggles with dementia and who, years earlier, caused a psychic event that killed off most of the surviving mutants. A small girl, codename X-23, comes to Wolverine looking for help. He soon realizes she is his clone, giving him something to fight for. Working from a script co-written by Scott Frank and Michael Green (eventually nominated, incredibly, for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar), Mangold creates a towering emotional accomplishment, complete with one of the best final shots in recent memory (with X-23 turning Logan’s tombstone from a cross to an “X”).
He incorporates some of the sillier elements, like a younger Logan doppelgänger and a gang of kids with superpowers, gamely, learning from the ways that “The Wolverine” went off the rails. And he gets great performances out of everybody, creating a fully lived-in wasteland. There really is nothing else like “Logan” – part road movie, part western – and you can feel its impact on pop culture confections that have come after (we’re looking at you, “The Mandalorian”). “Logan” showed that, for a character defined largely by his “berserker rage,” that Wolverine’s true superpower was his oversized heart.
1.”X-Men: First Class” (2011)
“X-Men: First Class’” production was notoriously chaotic, for a franchise built almost entirely of productions that are deeply problematic. Matthew Vaughn, who at one point was set to direct “X-Men: The Last Stand,” was wooed back for a franchise do-over; a prequel that would see all of the main characters re-cast, with the action taking place in the swinging 1960s. “Rushed” doesn’t quite cover the actual shoot. There were multiple units shooting across several locations (and stage work), with production wrapping in April 2011, just a few weeks before the movie was due to hit theaters. (There were also multiple editorial teams trying to wrangle the footage into a cohesive narrative.) And yet, despite all of this insanity – or maybe because of it? – “X-Men: First Class” stands as the very best movie in the franchise.
Part of that was Vaughn’s willingness to stir everything into one oversized pot. There was a bit of the proposed “Magneto” spin-off movie, with his development as a mutant and his later, “Inglourious Basterds”-style pursuit of his Nazi oppressors, and a splash of 007, with some real-world embroidery sewn in too (hello, Cuban missile crisis!) The 1960s setting, you would assume, would emphasize the parallels between Civil Rights leaders of the time, but, nope. (They also kill off a Black character early on, which is a real bummer.) Vaughn is all about the characters, now played by Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence (among others), and about giving the entire thing a frothy sense of fun.
Earlier entries were so tortured and so ashamed of the series’ comic book origins. Vaughn and his collaborators instead chose to emphasize those elements, full of bright colors and pop art expressionism. It’s just the best. Give in. “X-Men: First Class” rules.
