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There are more movies in the X-Men franchise than for any other superhero team in history. Overall, that’s great, as fans of the mutants have been able to enjoy their escapades onscreen for decades, with the only drawback being that many movies are naturally going to bring some weak entries. The X-Men movies certainly do range from absolute masterpieces in the superhero genre to some of the most infamously bad examples of how to adapt from a source. That makes it easy in some cases to get every X-Men movie ranked but pretty tough in others.
13. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
A common criticism shared between most of the movies on the lower half of this list is that they don’t seem to understand the source material. X-Men Origins: Wolverine not only doesn’t understand what’s appealing about most of its characters, but it goes a step lower by feeling like it was written by someone who had hardly read about any of the characters besides Wolverine himself at all. The low-hanging fruit here is Deadpool, whose notorious butchering in this film was even mocked in the first Deadpool movie, but that’s far from the only sin this film commits. Other characters like Blob, Gambit, and Emma Frost are similarly written poorly and underutilized. Good luck making it through this one without cringing at various low moments.
12. Dark Phoenix
There’s something uniquely embarrassing about marketing this movie as “The Dark Phoenix Saga adaptation that fans deserve,” only for this film to somehow turn out worse. To be fair, it’s debatable whether Dark Phoenix is actually worse than X-Men: The Last Stand, which is why they land so close together on this ranking. Where X-Men: The Last Stand butchers the source material more thoroughly, Dark Phoenix is just boring. The former at least has the action-packed Golden Gate Bridge fight. Dark Phoenix, in comparison, is just dull and really isn’t worth rewatching.
11. X-Men: The Last Stand
A lot of the strengths and weaknesses of this film were already iterated in the Dark Phoenix entry, but to recap: Fun Golden Gate Bridge fight scene, a borderline nonsensical adaptation of the Dark Phoenix comics. This movie is also from a time when superhero movies looking too “comic book-y” was considered a bad thing, so the Phoenix Force is some intangible power that makes skin bubble and disintegrate rather than being a cosmic flaming bird. At least the effects look good, and Famke Janssen puts a lot more effort into her brooding, dark Jean Grey than Sophie Turner, who can barely be bothered to show emotion in most of her acting.
10. X-Men: Apocalypse
The main sin of X-Men: Apocalypse is blending in far too easily with its contemporaries, which by 2016 had become a lot more numerous than the meager competition these movies used to have back in the early ’00s. Apocalypse is supposed to be one of the biggest X-Men villains of all time, and this film making him a paint-by-numbers third-act sky beam doomsday man with an entourage is effectively a reduction of a complex character down to an unfortunately rudimentary state. It’s certainly possible to do far worse with an X-Men movie, but there’s also a lot better.
9. The New Mutants
This movie took so long to come out and had such a troubled production that most X-Men fans went into the long-awaited screenings thinking, “Just what is this movie, anyway?” Most of those fans are still scratching their heads and asking that question. There’s definitely some respect due to director-writer Josh Boone (and co-writer Knate Lee) for clearly wanting to do something different with their superhero film here because this is the only movie on this list besides Logan that really isn’t a superhero film. It’s also not the horror/thriller it’s trying to be, either, and that’s where The New Mutants‘ problems arise: It doesn’t know what it wants to be. The end result is a mess, but it’s at least a coherent one, even if it stumbles over itself far too often.
8. Deadpool 2
The best way to describe Deadpool 2 is that it’s mostly more of exactly what fans of the original Deadpool would want. Sarcasm, disrespectful murder fests, and black humor are left and right packaged in a story that manages to show Wade Wilson has a heart at the end of the day. Ultimately, a viewer’s enjoyment of this movie will really boil down to how much fourth-wall-breaking they can handle. It’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t push any boundaries, but Josh Brolin does make a pretty fantastic Cable (Incoming fourth-wall joke in Deadpool & Wolverine about how Brolin also played Thanos).
7. The Wolverine
Before Dark Phoenix got absolutely buried in a release clouded by reshoot delays and the fact that nobody really cared to watch because Disney had just acquired Fox, The Wolverine was the film with the notorious lowest opening box office in X-Men history. That title has only cemented its status as perhaps the most underrated X-Men film of all time, however. This was Logan director James Mangold’s first crack at the character, and the seeds for what became Jackman’s impactful sendoff to the character can clearly be seen here. The story, unfortunately, lands a deal more generic, and the color grading here could have taken a lot of notes from Logan, but don’t ignore this film just because it doesn’t have the same reputation as the higher names on this list.
6. X-Men
Iron Man is often credited with being the movie that set off the superhero craze, but looking back to Y2K, the very first X-Men film set the stage that would one day birth the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There are elements of this movie that have undoubtedly become dated. The effects just, unfortunately, aren’t what they used to be, but that adds an element of camp that can be a lot of fun for anyone who doesn’t mind it. Aside from that, it’s a solid story introducing the X-Men/Brotherhood conflict and political mutant discrimination to the big screen.
5. X-Men: First Class
As a superhero movie fan, X-Men: First Class is a delight. It’s fun to see Xavier and Magneto butting heads in their younger days, especially with the performances of McAvoy and Fassbender which have become almost as iconic as Stewart and McKellan at this point. It’s great to see characters like Banshee, Havok, and Sebastian Shaw featured so prominently. As an X-Men fan, it’s hard not to knock this movie down a few pegs just for what it did to Darwin, not to mention how shamelessly it pushes major villains like Azazel into the silent sidekick role. Objectively, though, that’s more a nitpick that the vast majority of non-comics-reading viewers won’t notice or particularly care about at all.
4. Deadpool
It’s honestly just great that this movie happened at all. Love or hate Deadpool and his constant dark meta humor, throwing a little rated-R material into the generally sanitized world of superhero films, is a refreshing change of pace. Ryan Reynolds is rightfully categorized as a perfect match for the role of Wade Wilson, and this movie never tries to be something it’s not. It’s got the spirit and the action, and if its humor is up the viewers’ alley, then it’ll get the laughs, too.
3. X2
X2 takes the mutant fighting action and heartfelt character beats of the original film and turns it all up to ten with its sequel. This movie somehow manages to develop a deeper intimacy between all of the X-Men alongside Magneto and Mystique while adding Alan Cumming’s eccentric Nightcrawler portrayal into the mix and giving the franchise some of the best fight scenes it’s seen to this day. The opening Nightcrawler White House assassination sequence alone is still raved about by superhero fans the world over.
2. Logan
It’s hard to deny that Logan is an absolutely fantastic film and, until recently, a touching sendoff to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. This movie is rightfully not characterized as a “superhero” film in the way the others on this list are because its inspirations clearly derive more from the classic Westerns of the past. To that end, the movie feels like a love letter to X-Men and Western fans alike. It’s only partially an X-Men film, which is honestly the main reason it doesn’t take number 1 for every X-Men movie ranked, but that doesn’t make it any less of an essential watch for fans of the mutant team.
1. X-Men: Days of Future Past
The biggest (and maybe only) sin that X-Men: Days of Future Past commits is that it takes a story that shouldn’t revolve around Wolverine for once and makes it all about Wolverine. Aside from that, this is a shining example of what an X-Men film should be. It has sentinels and mutant persecution alongside thrilling additions like the famous Quicksilver scene, all wrapped up in a timeline-warping story that combines the older-era X-Men films with the new era. It has the action and the heart. It’s also, unfortunately, the last great film to have X-Men in the title, and it’s the movie the MCU writers and producers should look to if they want to make the new X-Men great.
