It’s hard to describe what it was like to sit down, 25 years ago today, to watch X-Men. I was born in 1980 and grew up loving and adoring superheroes. The Christopher Reeve Superman movies were everything to me. Posters and toys for Tim Burton’s Batman films were all over my room. And each week, I’d go to the local comic book shop to pick up new issues of X-Men, X-Force, X-O Manowar, Spawn, and so many others. The 1990s in particular were a golden age for comic books, but on the big screen, there wasn’t much there.
Then, on July 14, 2000, a movie was released that had Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, Sabertooth, and more, all on screen at the same time, in the same movie. Quite simply, there had never been anything like that before, and nothing would be the same ever again.
Of course, in the six decades or so between the rise of the comic book superhero and the release of X-Men, Hollywood had many, many attempts to bring superheroes to the big screen. And some, like the aforementioned DC films, really worked. But in the case of Marvel, all we had were campy, hard-to-see Captain America or Fantastic Four movies. We were still two years away from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Still eight years away from Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. But, on that fateful July day, Marvel’s most famous team made its big-screen debut, with incredible results.
I remember sitting down for the movie not knowing what to expect. The internet, of course, existed in 2000, and people had lots of thoughts on these new, dark costumes for the characters. It would be many, many years before film studios were okay with giving these characters more comics-accurate costumes. So it was hard to know whether or not this film would be true to those characters and comics or treat them like playthings.
Then the movie starts, and the first thing we see is a young boy being separated from his parents at Auschwitz. That made it very clear this was taking these characters incredibly seriously and treating them with the respect they deserved. That then carried over into the story about mutants being outcasts, about Wolverine finding a place among his people, and so much more. Looking back on the film, not only was its mere existence groundbreaking, but the casting, sets, and so much more have impacted what came later. Just last year we saw Hugh Jackman return to Wolverine in an R-rated movie that grossed over a billion dollars. It doesn’t get much more obvious than that.
Unfortunately, you can’t talk about X-Men without mentioning the shadow cast on the film now. X-Men was directed by Bryan Singer, a once beloved filmmaker who was later accused of numerous accounts of sexual assault and misconduct. Admittedly, those horrors can make it difficult to separate the art from the artist, especially when three years later he directed the even better sequel, X2. But even so, X-Men wasn’t just Singer’s creation. It was all the actors, writers, producers, craftspeople, studio executives, and more who worked on it. One of whom was a little-known associate producer named Kevin Feige, who would take the experience on to much bigger and better things at Marvel. He’d even get control of the X-Men decades later when Marvel’s parent company, Disney, purchased Fox. A new X-Men movie, the first under that banner, is now in the works.
Eventually, X-Men went on to gross about $300 million worldwide against a production budget of $75 million. It was a hit and gave 20th Century Fox confidence to move ahead with both the X-Men and other characters. We got Daredevil movies, Fantastic Four movies, and beyond. It also gave other studios, Sony in particular, proof that audiences would show up to movies that didn’t just have Superman or Batman in them. Two years later, Spider-Man was released and had the largest opening weekend of all time.
So as we sit here in 2025, with a new Superman movie in theaters, a new Fantastic Four movie coming in mere weeks, and a fifth Avengers movie in production, we can trace every one of those seeds back to July 14, 2000, when the X-Men made their big screen debut. The film shouted to the world that audiences everywhere love all superheroes, and the rest is history.
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