The One True X-Men

The live-action X-Men movies Bryan Singer launched with the first film back in 2000 have been an important part of the twenty-first century pop cultural landscape. They have not been the genre's biggest hits in an era in which billion-dollar hits seemed routine for many years. Excluding the affiliated Deadpool movies, the biggest hit the franchise produced was probably 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, the $746 million of which falls just short of a billion even in today's inflation-adjusted terms.

Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.

Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.

Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?

It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.