Every X-Men Movie Ranked
Logan has finally arrived in theaters and is taking over the box office.At the same time, it's [...]
Logan has finally arrived in theaters and is taking over the box office.
At the same time, it's raising the bar for the entire X-Men movies franchise, alongside fellow R-rated X-Men flick Deadpool.
With these excellent new movies now part of the X-Men's cinematic canon, ComicBook.com thought it was time revisit our rankings of all the X-Men movies.
It's worth noting that the X-Men franchise, despite its sordid reputation with Marvel fans, Fox's X-Men franchise has produced several stellar movies, and the difference in quality between one movie and the next on this list can be incredibly small. Choosing how to rank most of these films, especially the ones at the top of the list, was no easy task.
If you agree or disagree with our rankings, be sure to let us know how you feel by giving each film your own ComicBook.com User Rating.
Now click through the slideshow to see our rankings of all 10 X-Men movies.
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10. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a movie in which wolverines howl at the moon because nobody associated with the $150 million film could be bothered to look up what a wolverine actually is and realize they have more in common with badgers than with wolves.
It seems like nobody bothered looking up the character of Deadpool either because he's treated with about the same amount of disregard shown to the entire wolverine species.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the low point for the X-Men movies franchise. The film was so poorly received that 20th Century Fox scrapped plans for an X-Men Origins: Magneto movie and other solo films to follow and took the series back to the drawing board.
9. X-Men: The Last Stand
X-Men: The Last Stand has some of the better fight scenes of the original X-Men trilogy. That is the nicest thing that can be said for the movie.
The rest of the movie is basically a mess as the script attempts to bang Joss Whedon's "Gifted" arc from Astonishing X-Men and the classic "Dark Phoenix Saga" against each other repeatedly in the hopes that something coherent will follow into nothing. Nothing ever does.
X-Men: The Last Stand even includes a Juggernaut meme joke that felt dated on opening day. This was a sad end for the original X-Men movies.
8. X-Men: Apocalypse
Just when the X-Men movies franchise seemed to be on a roll, X-Men: Apocalypse proved to be a stumble.
There is good stuff in X-Men: Apocalypse. The new cast of young mutants proved charming and fun, and the film seemed to indicate that the franchise was moving away from its dark, early-2000s aesthetic.
However, too much time was spent too much time with its villain and revisiting themes that were already covered in the previous two X-Men prequel movies. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are both great, but even they can only rehash the tragic bromance of Magneto and Professor X so many times.
7. The Wolverine
The Wolverine had the unenviable job of serving as both a sequel to X-Men Origins: Wolverine and a follow-up to X-Men: The Last Stand.
The Wolverine wisely moved Wolverine away from the core X-Men series, both geographically and in terms of the core conflict and drama. The Wolverine took inspiration from Wolverine's adventures in Japan, including Chris Claremont and Fran Miller's beloved Wolverine miniseries, and sent Logan east to deal with a more personal challenge than solving mutant-human relations.
The Wolverine is a perfectly solid action movie right up until the third act, where the decision to introduce the Silver Samurai as a CGI cyborg, which was baffling in terms of fidelity to the source material and storytelling, sends the whole thing off the rails.
6. X-Men
With the modern glut of superhero films releasing in theaters, it can be easy to forget that X-Men was what started it all.
A superhero team like the X-Men had never been brought successfully to the big screen before. Director Bryan Singer made it happen, with great performances from Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Ian McKellen as Magneto, and Patrick Stewart as Professor X.
Compared to modern superhero movies, particularly those from Marvel, X-Men may seem like it takes itself a bit too seriously, and the plot isn't particularly inspired, but it remains a stellar introduction to the cinematic X-Men and a seminal piece of superhero cinema.
5. X-Men: First Class
When things seemed darkest for the X-Men movies franchise, director Matthew Vaughn shone a light with X-Men: First Class, a prequel film that took many fans by surprise.
X-Men: First Class was set in the 1960s, the same decade that the X-Men were created, and told the story of how Professor X and Magneto first met. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender play the young mutant leaders and have enough chemistry to carry the rest of the film, which is a bit weaker.
January Jones fails to do Emma Frost justice, the most of the actual first class of X-Men and the Hellfire Club are treated like power sets to fill out the fight scenes more than actual characters and the decisions to kill Darwin and have Angel turn villain midway through the movie still feel poorly made.
That said, X-Men: First Class remains the brightest and most stylistically distinct of the core X-Men films.
4. X2: X-Men United
Dumb title aside, X2: X-Men United did what a good superhero sequel should do by expanding on the things that made the original X-Men successful and expanding on it, both literally in terms of the cast of characters and in terms of the scope of the world they live in.
With a plot loosely inspired by the classic X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, the film introduces one of the X-Men's greatest enemies, humanity. William Stryker is not a supervillain god, he's a man with distinct ties to Wolverine, which makes him a much more interesting villain.
The movie also introduces Nightcrawler with an opening action sequence that remains one of the franchise's best.
3. X-Men: Days Of Future Past
X-Men: Days of Future Past was something truly special. Never before in a superhero movie have two separate casts of a movie franchise come together for a film like this.
The X-Men franchise was uniquely suited to doing so since time travel has long been part of its narrative DNA, beginning with the classic "Days of Future Past" story on which the film is based.
Bringing to together the cast of X-Men: First Class with the cast of the original X-Men trilogy, even if they were separated in time, allowed for a true passing of the torch for the X-Men franchise, and the team fights against the Sentinels in the future were a high point for the franchise, thanks largely to the creative use of Blink's powers.
2. Logan
Hugh Jackman has been the heart of the X-Men movies franchise for 17 years, playing Wolverine nine times in total. Logan proved to be an incredible, moving sendoff to a superhero movie icon.
Taking place in the near future and accepting an R rating meant that Logan was able to go to darker places than the main X-Men franchise. The fight scenes are brutal, the performances from Jackman and Stewart are excellent, and the introduction of Dafne Keen as X-23 is a very welcome one.
There's some argument that the final act of Logan doesn't quite measure up to the first two, but that's quite a high bar. Logan is a movie that superhero fans are going to be talking about for a long time to come.
1. Deadpool
Deadpool is something of a Cinderella story for the X-Men movies franchise. The film was originally planned as a follow-up to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the studio got skittish after fans reacted so negatively to the first Wolverine solo film.
Flash forward several years to someone leaking the test footage and you get a positive reaction from fans strong enough for Fox to quickly greenlight the Deadpool movie. When it was finally released, Deadpool proved to be everything fans had been hoping for: funny, irreverent, raunchy, and action-packed.
No other X-Men film, maybe even no other superhero film, has so successfully infused a movie with the energy of its main character, and that energy remains at a constant high throughout the entire film.
Now Deadpool is practically a mini-franchise unto itself and will be a big part of the X-Men movies franchise going forward.
