The X-Men Films, Ranked From Worst To Best
‘If you can’t handle me at my Apocalypse, you don’t deserve me at my Logan’ – Deadpool, probably
The X-Men franchise has had its fair share of ups and downs. With the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, we’re seeing Hugh Jackman’s Logan and other Fox X-Men characters enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a significant moment in superhero movie history, and it’s a great time to look back at the X-Men saga and appreciate how Fox, despite some notable blunders, produced some of the most iconic superhero films. The differences in quality are so striking that comparing the worst to the best makes it hard to believe that the same people were involved. However, let’s dive into the best and worst of the X-Men films!
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
The first attempt at an X-Men prequel is so terrible that other movies in the franchise still make fun of it today. Do you think Deadpool & Wolverine won’t have at least a few jokes referencing the disastrous mess that was turning Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool into a mouthless superweapon? While the poor treatment of Deadpool is one of the most meme-worthy aspects of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a moment that spawned an entire spin-off series aimed at correcting it), it’s far from the movie’s only problem. It’s sluggish, focuses on the less interesting parts of Wolverine’s origins while glossing over the more captivating ones, and for a movie supposedly about Logan, ends up with a bloated cast of characters who contribute very little. Luckily, Jackman and audiences got a much tighter film focused on Wolverine eight years later, but Origins: Wolverine remains a stain on a series desperately needing a win after, well, the next movie on our list.
X-Men: Apocalypse
X-Men: Apocalypse
After 2014’s Days of Future Past set the X-Men franchise up for success, it’s a real shame that Apocalypse falls so flat. The third film in the prequel series feels like they were just making “another one” of these. It attempts to replicate the successes of its predecessors, like with a painful inferior take on Days of Future Past’s Quicksilver slo-mo rescue, and introduces long-awaited characters like Storm and Psylocke only to do very little with them. Also, what a waste of Oscar Isaac’s talents as the titular big bad! This sums up Apocalypse pretty concisely: it’s a movie with a lot of material to work with and talent on screen that somehow manages to devolve into the least imaginative or memorable versions of each.
Dark Phoenix
Dark Phoenix
It’s baffling that Dark Phoenix was as bad as it was, considering that the last time the movies attempted this comic book storyline, it was widely considered the franchise’s low point. You’d think they’d go the extra mile to get it right the second time around, but the fourth and final entry in X-Men’s prequel movies feels like it’s running on fumes. If Apocalypse lacked passion, Dark Phoenix is what happens when you signed a contract a decade ago and are legally obligated to make a movie. Even the final scene between Fassbender and McAvoy is so muted compared to every other gut-wrenching and electric scene the two shared. Who was this movie for if not the shareholders?
Sophie Turner deserves a shoutout for doing her best to lead the film as Jean Grey, working with nothing from anyone else. But Dark Phoenix marks the second misfire in adapting an iconic X-Men storyline, and I’ll be surprised if Marvel ever attempts it again, even with the X-Men license back in its clutches. Let Jean live a happy life in one continuity, for goodness sake.
More updates: Is Kumail Nanjiani Set to Star as Booster Gold in James Gunn’s DC Cinematic Universe, a Race-Swapped Twist in the Making?
X-Men: The Last Stand
X-Men: The Last Stand
The third movie in the X-Men franchise probably would have been much better had it not been for Superman Returns poaching a chunk of its creative team and cast. But X-Men: The Last Stand still manages to feel like messing up a recipe when most of the ingredients are still sitting on the kitchen counter. The Last Stand is widely criticized for its senseless violence against the X-Men, killing off major characters for shock value rather than giving those moments real substance. This lends credence to the internalized anti-mutant sentiment characters like Rogue had been unlearning for two movies, essentially unraveling everything the first two movies set up without a plan. The Last Stand is so bad that Days of Future Past’s entire setup feels like it was designed to erase it from existence. Thankfully, it did.
The New Mutants
The New Mutants
> Preserving the Legacy of the Volkswagen Beetle in a Mexico City Neighborhood
The New Mutants, the horror film based on the X-Men, went under the radar for most people. This is partly because it opened during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a box office bomb. Even with big names like Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams, Fury Road lead Anya Taylor-Joy, and Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton, The New Mutants failed to draw in the same audience as even the worst X-Men movies. But the often-forgotten film starring a group of mutants kept in a hospital and tormented by their worst fears had some compelling ideas. It’s not a great or even good merging of the superhero and horror genres, but it at least stands out above the sludge ranked below it.
Deadpool 2
Deadpool 2
Following Deadpool was a tough act to follow. A huge part of what the 2016 movie offered was its shocking nature. It was an X-Men film that broke every rule, released at the height of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success (no, it wasn’t part of it, but regular audiences weren’t researching such details), containing astonishing violence and wildly inappropriate jokes. A sequel wasn’t going to be able to rely on any of this, given its audience were going in expecting it all.
The solution wasn’t one that outlandish comedy sequels have tended to use in the past. It tried harder. It worked harder at its plot, its characters, and its pacing, creating a more nuanced setting in which it could goof around like a nine-year-old who’d learned a bunch of new curse words. Relationships felt more meaningful, the emotional tone felt more earned. And yet, it was still immensely stupid, violent, and gasp-inducing.
Still, it couldn’t ever have the same impact as the original. To do that, it’d have to do something completely radical, like, I dunno, break through the walls of reality to enter the MCU, dragging some of Marvel’s most respected characters into its vortex of immature nonsense.
X-Men
X-Men
The original X-Men movie is fascinating to watch as it harkens back to a simpler time for superhero films. It’s remarkably restrained, given how the genre has expanded into multiverses and uses CG backgrounds for every shot. Every scene feels intentional, building upon the mutant struggle and how each member of the X-Men factors into it. The 2000 movie is refined instead of referential. It’s campy instead of quippy. Overall, it’s just a really solid flick that understands what the X-Men are about. And god, talk about a perfectly cast film. Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McKellen are some of, if not the best-casted superhero roles in the genre, and have solidified themselves into the DNA of their characters.
The Wolverine
The Wolverine
2013 was a fascinating time for the X-Men franchise and comic book movies as a whole. The MCU was in full swing with the first Avengers movie the year prior and a new cadence of at least two character-led blockbusters a year. X-Men, meanwhile, was hobbling along. The introduction of a new generation of heroes with X-Men: First Class in 2011 had tried to wash away the disappointment of Last Stand and the underwhelming awkwardness of Origins, but the damage was still fresh. So the fact that The Wolverine wasn’t just a good X-Men movie but also a decent action flick in its own right felt like a big surprise at the time.
Broken physically and emotionally, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine finds himself in Japan, powerless and on the run from the evil machinations of a corporate tycoon and old acquaintance. Despite being based on comic arcs by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, the spin-off movie was liberated from the constraints and demands of the larger X-Men films, letting it indulge in poignant character moments the larger series didn’t always have time for amid world-ending showdowns.
The Wolverine whips between bucolic countryside and colorful city streets, showcases some incredible action sequences, including one on a bullet train, and builds out the tormented hero’s backstory in economical but effective ways. It’s the first time Jackman’s Wolverine gets to explore the existential stakes of his mutant powers and the hundreds of years of baggage accumulated from them. The Wolverine is ultimately a movie about death and what we owe one another and ourselves through our shared humanity and histories, and it manages to evoke those heavy themes without upstaging the fun and action of watching a guy with claws fight Yakuza.
Deadpool
Deadpool
The line between Ryan Reynolds the actor and Deadpool the character seems to become ever-more narrow. It’s hard not to suspect he wears the suit around the house, given how often it appears in the star’s TikToks and promos, and how Reynolds seems to have used it to exorcize all manner of aspects of his acting life. But before 2016, the association between actor and comic book antihero was an outstandingly negative one: the disastrous Origins: Wolverine, that’s very lucky not to be at the bottom of this list.
Deadpool changed all that, so damn fast. Having been worked on for years by Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, then later joined by director Tim Miller, the film became a labor of love, and somehow escaped the studio interference that would usually flatten a project this outlandish and extreme.
The movie is rightly celebrated for its fourth-wall-breaking nature, and the meta-commentary on both superhero cinema and its own intense violence and profanity, but if it were only that, it wouldn’t be this high on the list. It’s also a film with pathos, with integrity, and with characters who feel grounded in a reality that its plot is not entitled to. It’s also a damn fine story, and shot with the same visual flair Tim Miller brings to his incredible Love, Death & Robots animations. Oh, and it’s ludicrously funny.
X-Men: First Class
X-Men: First Class
At a glance, it’s easy to read X-Men: First Class as a cynical attempt to wring money out of a license after The Last Stand more or less scorched the earth you’d been building on. But the prequel is one of the most concise depictions of the X-Men mythos that it felt like a proper reboot before the bad sequels came in and fucked it all up.
First Class is all about the founding of the X-Men and Brotherhood of Mutants, with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender taking on the younger roles of Professor X and Magneto. Jennifer Lawrence also starred as Mystique before she was ever in The Hunger Games, and seeing a younger generation of actors bring new life into those roles made for a compelling origin story that could have easily felt trite and unnecessary. The film is elevated by McAvoy and Fassbender’s chemistry, who both had huge shoes to fill after Stewart and McKellen had become so embedded in the public eye as Professor X and Magneto. They manage to capture the conflict bright-eyed hope and beaten-down cynicism that fuels the X-Men franchise, and even when the future movies fell short of First Class’ promise, that fire never goes out.
X-Men: Days of Future Past
X-Men: Days of Future Past
While First Class felt like a way to sidestep old mistakes and still capitalize on beloved characters, Days of Future Past is an excellent swing at fixing those mistakes so the franchise can move forward. It didn’t pay off as substantially worse movies followed, but the film’s remixing of an iconic moment in X-Men’s history is a truly effective use of the series’ past to pave the way for its future.
The movie is essentially a crossover of X-Men movies new and old, with Jackman’s Wolverine at the center. During an apocalyptic moment in mutant history, Logan goes back in time to warn the First Class versions of the X-Men of the creation of the sentinels, only to find them in a state of disarray and McAvoy’s Professor X in need of some schooling himself. It’s X-Men at its most melodramatic, filled with some of the series’ best depictions of the mutant struggle. McAvoy, Fassbender, and Lawrence give their best performances in what should have solidified them alongside their predecessors in these roles. It’s a shame the films that followed failed to capitalize on its successes.
X2: X-Men United
X2: X-Men United
X2: X-Men United starts with one of the best openings in all of superhero cinema with Nightcrawler attacking the White House, and it never lets up. The sequel manages to stay contained in the original’s focus while expanding into new viewpoints, anxieties, and allegories that have made the X-Men a beloved touchstone with so many people. X2 is harrowing in its darkest moments, its action is flamboyant and theatrical, and when it’s diving into the depths of its heroes, it is hopeful and tragic in equal measure.
So many scenes from X2 still stand up as some of the best in the genre. Nightcrawler’s White House assassination attempt is so succinct that it sets the tone while telling a concise story all its own. Magneto’s escaping his plastic prison by drawing iron from a security guard’s blood captures the threat of the Brotherhood’s charismatic leader. And who could forget Jean’s sacrifice at the very end as X2 cranks up the melodrama for one of the most gut-wrenching finales in the series? It’s an ambitious sequel that knew it had struck gold with its cast, and brings out the most in each of them.
Logan
Logan
I hope Deadpool & Wolverine is good, because it would be a real shame if that movie sullies what could have been a stunning sendoff for Jackman’s portrayal of Wolverine in Logan. The 2017 film is best taken as a standalone story given it doesn’t seem to fit neatly after any specific X-Men movie, but its distance from everything else makes it the most distinct film in the franchise, and in all of superhero cinema. Logan follows the men formerly known as Wolverine and Professor X in a dystopian future where mutant births ceased decades ago and the X-Men have been almost entirely wiped out.
From the outset, Logan is about lost pasts, and dwindling futures. The film is a character study into a version of Logan who has lived through a lot and is tired of the world. He’s also caring for an aging Professor X who is suffering from a debilitating disease. Logan is not a typical superhero movie; it’s a gritty, western-inspired film that explores themes of mortality, family, and redemption. The action sequences are brutal and raw, reflecting the film’s somber tone. Logan is a masterpiece of superhero cinema, a poignant and powerful film that deserves its place at the top of this list.
The X-Men franchise has had its share of highs and lows, but it’s undeniable that it has left a lasting impact on the superhero genre. From the groundbreaking original film to the gritty masterpiece that is Logan, the X-Men movies have given us some of the most memorable moments in superhero cinema. And with Deadpool & Wolverine on the horizon, it’s an exciting time to be an X-Men fan. Let’s hope the future holds more successes than failures.
What is the ranking of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in the X-Men film series?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is considered one of the worst films in the X-Men franchise.
Why is X-Men: Apocalypse considered a disappointment in the X-Men film series?
X-Men: Apocalypse is criticized for falling flat and not living up to the success of its predecessor, Days of Future Past.
