The X-Men at 20: All the X-Films Ranked

by Ian Carlos Crawford

It’s been 20 years since the Uncanny X-Men first graced the big screen. 20 years since Magneto and Professor X played their first game of chess. 20 years since Wolverine unleashed his claws to the world. 20 years since Storm asked Toad if he knew what happened to a toad when it’s struck by lightning.

Without that first X-Men film, we probably never would’ve gotten the current slew of iconic (and not so iconic) superhero movies. Blade proved Marvel could make blockbuster action movies and X-Men proved they could translate a big team to the big screen.

The X-Men have also been viewed as the queerest of superhero teams. They’re just as much a chosen family as they are a world saving team. They’re othered — they’re feared and hated just because of who they are. The government tries to regulate their rights. It’d be heavy handed if this weren’t a comic that was created in the 60s.

And while the comics have featured many LGBTQ characters, the closest the movies got was the scene of Iceman coming out…as a mutant to his parents in the second film. That is until the more recent Deadpool movies.

The movies are incredibly chaotic and unbalanced. They’re full of time travel, deaths, black leather outfits, superpowered battles — some of the more recent ones are embarrassingly bad, while some of the oldest ones still 100% hold up. It’s a franchise that many gays nerds of a certain age (looks directly in the mirror) hold a soft spot for while knowing full well they’re not the best.

So, let’s get to that ranking…

12) X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Everyone involved in this movie is asleep. It’s an even worse version of the already horrendous X-Men: Last Stand (I’ll get there). Jean’s Phoenix outfit is “same flowy red jacket from Last Stand but more lame.” The Dark Phoenix comic is a freakin’ space opera — not a muted story devoid of color! It hurts knowing it’s the official final X-film in the Fox franchise (until New Mutants is released 500 years from now when quarantine is over, that is). The set pieces are boring, the costumes are more boring — it takes place in the 90s yet no one wears any fun colors or quirky outfits. They cast Jessica freakin’ Chastain as…generic alien villain and give her basically zero motivation. Nothing, absolutely nothing about this movie works.

It’s almost a relief — both to the viewers and to Jennifer Lawrence — when Mystique and her very tired wig abruptly die at the 15 minute mark and no one cares. Evan Peters disappears for half the movie and they make sure to awkwardly shoehorn in Fassbender’s Magneto because those contracts must have been sealed with the blood of every actor involved. But the most insulting thing about the movie? That .5 second Dazzler cameo that’s nonsense yet also the best part of the movie.

11) X-Men: The Last Stand

This movie is also very bad! It’s a shame because the cast doesn’t even seem tired in this one. The only, and I mean only, thing that this movie does well is the action scenes. The scene in Jean’s childhood home is…almost good? It’s the most action they give Storm in the entire franchise. But even with those they go too big and by the end, there’s so much going on it’s like action soup.

The biggest thing these movies do wrong with the Dark Phoenix Saga is they don’t make Jean redeemable. They also insist on making Phoenix Jean Grey’s alter ego. They have this character commit genocide and all the character stand around with their thumbs up their butts arguing about if Jean is bad or not. She murders numerous teammates and we know from the start this it’s just who she is! There’s no Phoenix force alien controlling her — she just being her true self. Yet Wolverine continues to defend her — just say you’re horny, dude!

Some of the many atrocities of this film are: Cyclops dying off screen, Jean Grey’s dumb Phoenix outfit, Jean murdering Professor X, Jean’s weird ability to turn folks to dust (Thanos who), and the bazillion generic mutants that they clearly gave X-Men names to in post.

Both Dark Phoenix films could never measure up to the X-Men Animated Series near perfect Dark Phoenix Saga.

10) Wolverine: Origins

This movie is also very bad! Arguably just as bad as the previous two abominations. This movie gives us more Wolverine — something we absolutely didn’t need as by X-Men: The Last Stand the movies are basically Wolverine and His Whacky Pals.

The movie introduces approx. 800 iconic X-characters from the comics to the movie universe and completely blows it with each and every one of them. Imagine giving us an Emma Frost who isn’t the gay icon we know and love (but lol more on that later). Imagine casting Ryan Reynolds as the role we all knew he was made for, Deadpool, then sewing his character’s mouth shut! Deadpool is literally called “Merc with a mouth” — as we see in the movies he often talks so much he works both his teammates and the audience’s nerves! So, ha ha, let’s sew his mouth shut? Get outta here!

And we also get the cartoonishly miscast Liev Schreiber as Sabretoth. We also see Wolverine continually getting his ass kicked by said Sabretooth. Oh, and we meet one of the leaders of Alpha Flight, Heather Hudson, but she’s an elderly woman who gets immediately brutally murdered for being nice to Wolverine. It’s said this movie killed any future ideas for an X-Men Origin movie series…but that didn’t stop Fox from forging ahead with other bad ideas! The devil works hard but Fox works harder!

9) X-Men: Apocalypse

This movie does the almost impressive feat of adding Lana Condor, Oscar Isaac, and Olivia Munn to the movie franchise and completely wastes all three of them. Lana Condor’s Jubilee has next to zero lines — zero! The editing in this movie is so bad it feels like a joke that every time the camera pans to her, it cuts away as she opens her mouth.

This movie, much like every other First Class-era X-movie forces both Magneto and Mystique on the viewers. They aren’t welcome! We’re allowed to have other X-Men in these goddamned movies! But I guess once you get Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence, I guess you can’t not use them until they’re both sleepwalking through every movie. This movie does what all the other previous movies on this list — it adds important characters from the comics and gives them no lines then murders them.

The final action scene even looks like the one from X-Men: the Last Stand. The only thing that puts this movie above the others? The scene of Quicksilver running through the X-mansions saving everyone from the explosion while “Tainted Love” plays. And even that is a cheap, albeit fun, redo of the Quicksilver scene from Days of Future Past. Evan Peters at least seems to be having fun in this movie unlike every one of his co-stars. We get a very weird Wolverine cameo and a completely unearned Phoenix ending.

Also, can someone tell me where to get Quicksilver’s silver sneakers?

8) The Wolverine

This movie isn’t the best but it’s okay! It has some good ideas. It’s also the only X-movie to actually address the trauma these characters are constantly put through movie after movie. Jean Grey appears but only in dream sequences. The stakes are fairly low which is also a nice change of pace. Wolverine goes to Japan and it feels like the comic book it is loosely based off.

This movie was clearly Fox trying to start over after the unfixable mess of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They almost got there too! But this movie is mostly forgettable — it also still tries to go big in the end by having the Silver Samurai be an absurd giant robot armor costume and turning the other villain Viper into a low budget Miranda from Sex and the City.

Bonus points for the movie universe’s first appearance of Yukio and them actually nailing it. Negative points for them deleting the scene where Wolverine finally gets his goddamned comic book costume!

7) X-Men: First Class

After quite a few bad movies, the franchise seemed to semi get back on track with this one. Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence, and Rose Byrne are all there in this soft reboot/prequel and not one of them is sleepy eyed!

This movie gives us a Magneto/Xavier dynamic that nearly rivals that of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart’s. It also gave us another go at Emma Frost with January Jones and completely shit the bed.

The training scenes actually feel fun in this film. I’m not big on prequels but this one works for what it is — even if it feels slightly overloaded. Kevin Bacon isn’t maybe the best choice for Sebastian Shaw but he makes it work. The ending is actually an emotional one — we learn how Xavier got paralyzed and exactly when Magneto became the supervillain we loved in the previous films.

Not that continuity ever mattered or made sense in these films — but it’s an enjoyable watch. This movie is also the closest we ever get to comic accurate costumes.

6) Deadpool 2

It’s wild that the actual X-movie with any gay characters is also the bro-iest of them. Deadpool 2 is a mess of a movie but Ryan Reynolds sure sells his Wade Wilson. The thing about these movies is, everyone seems to be having a blast.

The Deadpool movies are bro-y but the kind of bro-y that loves his gay friends and might even experiment with one or two of his gay friends. In this movie Negasonic Teenage Warhead comes out and also has a girlfriend — our second incarnation of Yukio. It’s very very cool seeing this queer couple not only exist on screen, but get to help save the day at the climax of the film.

It also introduces Domino, Cable, and a few other iconic X-characters to the big screen. Deadpool 2 still does the dumb thing the X-movies love to do and introduces a bunch of characters just to kill them (like the canonically queer Shatterstar, for which I am forever bitter about) but at least it does it for laughs and not for edgy bonus points.

5) X-Men

This movie still mostly holds up! The pacing is a little slow and it’s very of the time but damn if it’s not still enjoyable. Watching this movie in 2020 requires the knowledge that big budget superhero team movies like Avengers and even the lesser Justice League were unthinkable. No one was making these movies before this one became a huge success. So you need to forgive the black leather and bad accents.

It’s a muted movie that works. It still pokes fun at the superhero genre (Cyclops makes a joke about yellow spandex, Wolverine mocks their codenames) but it also validated the genre to a generation of nerds. Ian McKellen as Magneto and Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier is such iconic casting — their chemistry is beyond. They have what all the other superhero movies want!

The movie even has a twist that’s easy to forget — we spend half the movie thinking Magneto is hunting Wolverine only to learn he’s actually after Rogue. While Toad gets struck by lightning and Sabretooth gets thrown off the statue of liberty, this movie is one of the few X-films where no characters suffer a senseless, edgy deaths.

4) Deadpool

It felt like this movie had been rumored for decades before it actually happened. It also shows Ryan Reynolds commitment to the character that we got this after the complete Deadpool debacle in X-Men Origin: Wolverine.

It’s easy to brush the Deadpool movies off — they sometimes feel like a prolonged fart joke or a Family Guy episode. But the thing is, they’re not mean and they have a lot of fun. Deadpool winks at the camera more than Jim Halpert but does so while entrenched in a bloody fight to the death with assassins. From the music to the effects, this movie knows what it is.

It introduces us to the iconic Negasonic Teenage Warhead (wild that she’s an actual character form the comics) and gives us a brand new Colossus because sure why not!

3) Logan

I need to be honest — I think this is objectively a very good movie but I don’t quite enjoy it. Hugh Jackman gives his god damned best Wolverine performance in this movie. The movie is a really great adaptation of Old Man Logan. It keeps with the bleakness version of the future we saw in that comic.

The movie, however, as Wolverine’s final movie, just feels unfair. The X-Men have all died before the movie begins and we meet an Xavier who is suffering from Alzheimer’s and near death. Then he gets stabbed to death because these movies love killing their characters.

Wolverine deserved a less bleak ending. He’d been our hero for nearly two decades. But if we have to get a bleak end, then this Oscar nominated ending is the one.

2) X2

This movie did what many superhero movie sequels fail to do — it improved on the first film in every single way! From the start, this movie catches your attention.

That Nightcrawler White House scene is shot so perfectly. It’s suspenseful yet beautiful. The score playing as Nightcrawler terrorizes the Oval Office and the secret service agents get thrown around the room in slow motion? I don’t know a better scene!

This movie also is one of the few post-first X-movie that brings Magneto back in an organic way. We get a villain that’s actually human, which feels very true to the X-Men mythos (and literally is since the story is loosely based on the X-Men comic God Loves, Man Kills). The action scenes are better in this movie and characters like Storm and Jean get to do way more than they did in the first film.

The wigs, however, don’t get better. But we can’t all be perfect!

1)X-Men: Days of Future Past

Avengers: Endgame might be the epic, earned superhero team up movie but before there was that there was Days of Future Past — a movie that still gives the MCU movies a run for their money.

This movie flawlessly combined the First Class-era lineup with the early 2000s era lineup. The time travel mostly makes sense (as long as you buy Kitty Pryde’s powers being…whatever they are turned into for this movie). It’s the most authentic X-Men movie based on one of the more iconic comic stories. It also is the last X-Men team movie to feel fun? It gave us our first Quicksilver slow motion scene, had Wolverine cracking jokes, and still kept the tension throughout.

This movie was the perfect end to the Fox movies. We saw our beloved heroes getting slaughtered one by one in the future but then, in a shocking twist, Wolverine actually succeeds in the past and we end on a happy note. We see Wolverine wake up in Xavier’s mansion to find all his formerly dead teammates thriving in this new version of the future.

It’s a tearful reunion and one that feels nice after the bleakness of the other films — if only Fox had known when to let a good thing go!

About the Author:

Ian Carlos Crawford grew up in southern New Jersey and, like most people from NJ, he graduated from Rutgers University. He then graduated from New School with an MFA in nonfiction writing. His writing has appeared on sites like Geeks Out, BuzzFeed, NewNowNext, and other random corners of the internet. He currently co-hosts a podcast about his favorite thing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called Slayerfest 98 and is shopping around his fiction manuscript. Follow him on Twitter @ianxcarlos!