In the summer of 2000, a big-budget superhero movie was about as far from a sure thing as Hollywood could imagine. The state of the genre was dire: Batman’s popularity was on the decline after fans rejected director Joel Schumacher’s campy take on the caped crusader. Additionally, Superman was too much of a do-gooder for edgy, Y2K-era audiences. The success of Blade a couple of years earlier suggested superheroes still had potential. However, there was no guarantee that one R-rated vampire movie could prop up an entire industry.
Enter the X-Men, who blasted and clawed their way into theaters 25 years ago on July 14, 2000.
The original X-Men movie was a huge gamble. It cost nearly twice as much as Blade and assumed the popularity of the hit ‘90s cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series would lead to box office success. When the ensemble superhero flick became a smash hit, it opened the floodgates to a wave of similar movies that Hollywood executives are still riding to this day.
A Chaotic Production
20th Century Fox acquired the rights to make an X-Men movie in 1994 (back then, Marvel was facing bankruptcy and selling anything it could), but it took years to come up with a workable script. Christopher McQuarrie and Joss Whedon both made valiant attempts (Whedon’s script was deemed too quippy, and only two of his lines survived, including Storm’s infamous “when a toad gets hit by lightning” joke) before David Hayter ultimately rewrote the entire thing based on his deep knowledge of the comics.
Director duties fell to Bryan Singer, who has retreated from Hollywood in recent years over disturbing allegations of sexual assault. His behavior on the set of X-Men was no exception. The studio eventually sent in a young Kevin Feige, then working as an associate producer for Fox, to keep Singer in line. (Feige also snuck X-Men comics onto the set for the actors to read after Singer banned them.)
X-Men’s sprawling cast, which featured iconic actors like Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Halle Berry, and the then-unknown Hugh Jackman, was almost very different. Singer initially offered the role of Wolverine to Russell Crowe, who turned it down but suggested Jackman for the part. The studio also tried to cast Janet Jackson as Storm and Charlize Theron as Jean Grey.
While chaos and controversy might have marred the production process, the final result is undeniably a great movie and a box office hit. X-Men made $296.3 million on a budget of $75 million and received positive reviews (its Rotten Tomatoes score is 82%). The sequel, X-2, would fare even better, but X-Men’s true legacy goes far beyond this one superhero franchise.
The legacy of X-Men
Marvel saw the success of X-Men at Fox (and Spider-Man, two years later, at Sony) and took note. The comic book publisher no longer had the movie rights to its biggest and best-known franchises, but it had an entire toy box full of lesser-known characters to play with.
Believe it or not, the Avengers were virtually unknown back then (in 2002, Marvel even attempted to rebrand them as “The Ultimates” in a new comic). But Marvel, and Kevin Feige in particular, looked at the success of X-Men and realized that superhero movies were the future.
The result is one of the greatest success stories in modern Hollywood history. Feige went from being an associate producer on the set of X-Men to running Marvel Studios, while Marvel went from teetering on the verge of bankruptcy to making $1.521 billion at the box office with 2012’s The Avengers after getting acquired by Disney for $4 billion a few years earlier.
Without X-Men, it’s unclear whether any of that would have happened. Marvel might still be a struggling comic book publisher selling off the rights to various characters on an ad hoc basis, rather than the cultural powerhouse it’s become in the 25 years since. And it’s all thanks to Professor Charles Xavier and his uncanny X-Men.
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