5 Superhero Ensemble Movies That Are So Much Better Than X2: X-Men United

On December 18th, Avengers: Doomsday arrives with Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Alan Cumming and Rebecca Romijn among its cast, which is five performers from X2 X-Men United returning to the roles more than twenty years later. That makes this a decent moment to say something a little rude about the film they are returning from. X2 is very good. It holds 85% on Rotten Tomatoes from 249 critics and a 68 on Metacritic, and it was never nominated for an Academy Award in any category. There are other superhero movies that are, frankly, better.

The standard for this list is simple and it is applied to every entry: beat those two numbers, and be an actual ensemble rather than a solo film with guests in the third act. That second rule is why Spider-Man: No Way Home is not here despite clearing the scores. The first rule is why The Avengers is not here either, which will annoy people, so here is the reason up front. It beats X2 on Metacritic by exactly one point. That is not better. That is a tie with extra steps.

A word on what this list is not. It is not a ranking of superhero movies generally, because a great deal of the genre’s best work is solo work and would sail past the numbers without ever qualifying. It is not a list of films that are more fun than X2, which is a different and much softer argument. And it is not an argument that X2 has aged badly, because it has not. The point of setting the bar at 85% and 68 is that it is high enough to eliminate most of the genre and low enough that the films which clear it clear it decisively rather than by a point. Every entry below beats both numbers and passes the ensemble test, which means the cast is the structure rather than the marketing. They are ordered from the smallest margin to the largest, so the case gets harder to argue with as the list goes on.

5) Guardians of the Galaxy

Start with the one that had the least reason to work. James Gunn took Marvel’s least famous property, a team almost nobody outside comics shops could name, and got 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from 339 critics and a 76 on Metacritic, which beats X2 by six points and eight points respectively. The reason it belongs on a list about ensembles specifically is that it is the rare team film where the team is the plot rather than the payoff. Nobody in it starts out wanting to be there. The film spends its entire running time forcing five people who actively dislike each other into the same room, and the climax works because they finally hold hands, which should be unbearable and instead lands.

Compare that to how X2 handles its roster. X2 is excellent at giving twelve characters one good moment each, but it is a film about mutants who already know and mostly already like one another. Guardians had to build the relationships from nothing in one movie, and it did it while being funny. That is harder.

4) Avengers: Endgame

There is no version of this list that can leave out the film that had to land 22 movies at once. Endgame holds 94% on Rotten Tomatoes from 551 critics, which is the largest critical sample of anything here and more than twice the number of reviews X2 was measured on, plus a 78 on Metacritic. It made $2.72 billion. The scale is the argument.

X2 had to service one team and one villain across two hours and fourteen minutes, and it did that well. Endgame had to give closure to three separate decade-long lead arcs, resurrect half its cast, stage the largest battle the genre had attempted, and make a woman in a purple cloak snapping her fingers feel like an ending rather than a reset. It should not have worked. The thing that makes it an ensemble film rather than a crossover stunt is that the three central arcs actually finish, in ways that contradict each other and cost something, which is not what this genre usually does with a finale.

3) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

This is the entry that needs one sentence of defense, so here it is. Into the Spider-Verse is Miles Morales’s origin story, and you could argue the other Spiders are mentors rather than co-leads. But the film’s entire thesis is that Spider-Man is plural, the climax does not function without the group, and the reason Miles works at all is that five other people who have done this show him how. That is an ensemble. It holds 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 398 critics and an 87 on Metacritic, and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature along with seven Annie Awards, which is seven more major awards than X2 was ever nominated for. The gap is not just critical, it is formal. X2 is a well-made film that looks like every other well-made film of 2003. Into the Spider-Verse invented a visual language that the entire animation industry has been copying ever since, which is a different order of achievement.

2) Black Panther

Here is the single hardest fact for anyone defending X2 as a high-water mark. Black Panther was the first superhero film ever nominated for Best Picture. It won three Academy Awards, for Costume Design, Original Score and Production Design, and it took the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Cast, which is an award given specifically for ensemble work and therefore about as on-point as evidence gets for a list like this. It sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 527 critics and an 88 on Metacritic, twenty points clear of X2.

The ensemble case is straightforward once you notice that the title character is arguably the fifth most interesting person in his own movie. Nakia, Okoye, Shuri, M’Baku and Killmonger all drive plot, all disagree with the lead on substance, and all get to be right about something. X2 gives its supporting mutants moments, and it is generous with them. This gives its supporting cast positions, which is a different thing, because a position can be argued with and a moment can only be watched.

1) The Incredibles

The best superhero ensemble film arrived eighteen months after X2, was animated, and was not based on a comic at all. Brad Bird’s film holds 97% on Rotten Tomatoes from 248 critics and a 90 on Metacritic, which is twenty-two points above X2 and the highest number anywhere on this list. It won two Academy Awards, for Best Animated Feature and Sound Editing, and was nominated for Original Screenplay, which is the category that matters most here because it means the Academy thought the writing was among the year’s five best. And it is the purest ensemble of the five, because the team is a family. Nobody recruits anybody. The conflicts are not about whether these people will work together but about whether they can stand each other, which is a harder and more interesting question, and the film answers it in a hundred and fifteen minutes without a single scene of somebody explaining the plan.

None of this makes X2 bad. It made the modern superhero ensemble possible, and our own site has called it a five star classic, a position I understand even while disagreeing with it. But it already sits fourth in its own franchise, and Alan Cumming has said the shoot itself was awful. Twenty-three years is a long time to stay on top. The cast is getting a better sendoff in December than the film ever gave them.

Let us know in the comments if you disagree with our picks – or just think X2 is still the GOAT!

Every Fox X-Men Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best