Every Film In The X-Men Franchise Ranked From A-Men To Zzz-Men
For every 'Logan', there's a 'Last Stand'.
If there’s one thing you can say about 20th Century Fox’s X-Men franchise, it’s that they have been consistently releasing films since 2000. Starting at the eponymous X-Men, and moving forward all the way to the recent Dark Phoenix, we’ve had almost twenty years of blue and yellow clad mutants to enjoy.
However, not all X-Men films are created equally. It’s been a work in progress.
That said, there are absolute gems in this franchise, moments of joy for people like me, who just want the massively queer mutant freaks of my childhood to be represented well on screen.
We’ve had bangers like Deadpool and First Class. But we’ve also had others.
Hey, pobody’s nerfect!
Let’s rank all the films in the X-Men franchise.
12. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)
Generally regarded as one of the worst superhero films in the genre, X-Men Origins took probably the most successful and beloved character from the series and then explained that their backstory was terrible and made little sense.
It’s famous for introducing the character of Deadpool, an absolute cult-favourite character from the comics, and turning him into a weird mouthless zombie. The actual Deadpool film has since canonically apologised for this.
They literally made another film to apologise for this one.
11. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Ah. The very first time they tried to tell the X-Men’s most iconic comic book story, The Dark Phoenix saga.
It is NOT GOOD.
It seems one of the cardinal sins is trying to tell too many stories at once, smooshing Joss Whedon’s popular ‘Gifted’ storyline in with a weird Dark Phoenix-lite. Plus, the characters make no sense, and everything is stupid.
This movie was basically retconned out of existence, due to time-travel and what not, so we can all just try to forget about it.
10. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
X-Men: Apocalypse is a mess and a disappointment.
After the new, new reboot, there was every chance that the combo of cast and characters in the X-Men universe could tell some really fun and interesting stories. Expectations were raised — but instead we just got a big, bamboozling story about an old angry blue man.
Should have made him purple and massively into maths, worked for Marvel.
9. Dark Phoenix (2019)
Hey, let’s try to do this storyline again! Let’s fucking fail just as hard!
What is it about this story that is so hard to tell? Well, for one thing, the Dark Phoenix is famously a consequence, rather than necessarily a story on its own, and in these movies, it’s not adequately set up. In the comics, The Dark Phoenix follows on from the events of The Phoenix Saga, where Jean Grey melds with a mostly benevolent cosmic force and uses her newfound immense power to kick ass. However, in a classic “power corrupts” scenario, bad things start happening.
This is important — the film’s attempts to tell both parts of this story in two hours are rushed and nonsensical, and mostly revolve on a completely characterless Jessica Chastain. What we instead get is a very boring film, that cannot be saved by Sophie Turner actually doing her best.
8. The Wolverine (2013)
Just a very nothing film! In this one, Wolverine fights a lot of dudes with swords in Japan, and it’s fine. Just fine. Watch it on a plane!
7. X-Men (2000)
This film has fucking AGED.
There’s something in the costumes, in the shooting itself, in the completely hamfisted dialogue that almost swings it into camp. Halle Berry and her wig asking that weird koan about “Do you know what happens when a toad gets struck by lightning?” and answering herself with “The same thing that happens to everything else.”
But it’s still a decent superhero film, and was pretty great back in 2000. Hugh Jackman’s vein-popped, angry boy Wolverine is iconic.
X-Men walked so The Avengers could run.
6. X2 (2003)
X2 would have been a great way to END the original X-Men films.
It gave us a big ol’ insight into Wolverine’s origins (in a way that made Origins rather pointless), and it gave us a PROPER superhero moment when Jean Grey sacrifices herself. Good, solid film.
5. X-Men: First Class (2011)
The reboot! The young babies!
In an effort to revitalise the franchise, they got rid of heaps of the old cast, got some fresh young faces and set it back in the swinging sixties, baby!
And it WORKED. There’s always been a camp element to the X-Men — matching outfits, big hair, everyone is canonically gay — and going with a sixties aesthetic absolutely clued in to this. It brought back FUN, which was wildly needed.
The end of the movie is a fucking mess, but whatever.
4. Deadpool 2 (2018)
Very good and very funny!
(These count as X-Men films, because there are X-Men characters in it)
In ways that most of the earlier Wolverine spin-offs never managed, this film goes deeper into Deadpool’s past in a satisfying way — AND manages to quite wonderfully grow this anti-hero. What a brilliant and hilarious film. What a bunch of needless violence!
3. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
This is such a good film!
What could have been a weird Frankenstein of an affair, mashing characters from the original with the hot new cast, gluing it all together with weird time-travel nonsense, somehow works. It’s not flawless, but it’s a big fun dumb concept that showcases the best parts of the X-Men as a superhero team. Powers! Fighting! Team! The future! Robots!
It’s entirely because this was so fun that made Apocalypse suck so bad in comparison.
2. Deadpool (2016)
A fourth-wall breaking, super-powered, ultra-violent, wise-cracking, antihero played by Ryan Reynolds? This could have been really really bad, and it was not. It is, in fact, very good. It’s super silly.
We actually needed something a bit self-referential at this point. We’ve been so saturated with superhero films that Deadpool‘s literal winks at the audience are not only endearing, they are necessary. We need to have a bit of scope to laugh at the films that preceded it.
1. Logan (2017)
Logan has received the kind of breathless praise from critics that has to make you wonder if perhaps on second viewing it might have lost some of its shine.
But it’s still wonderful. It’s still so good. Logan features an aged and sick Wolverine carting around an elderly Professor X with dementia, while trying to protect a young mutant girl who is basically baby version of himself. It stands alone in a different time-zone than any of the other films, and serves as a gripping and finely crafted farewell to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and Patrick Stewart’s Xavier.
It’s got so much going for it — a perfect performance by Dafne Keen as Laura (which is super exciting for her appearance in the upcoming His Dark Materials series), and a gritty, noir-ish tone that doesn’t delve into melodrama.
Metaphorically, it’s very much the old guard (Hugh Jackman) saying goodbye and ushering in the X-Men franchise into a new beginning — hopefully, we’ll one day get that realised in actuality. The X-Men has so much promise, and with superhero films only growing from strength-to strength, we really deserve more films like Logan.
Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.