‘X-Men’ at 25: the movie that started the superhero boom, for better or worse
These days, it’s hard to imagine a time before the current dominance of superheroes in the Hollywood landscape. After all, there are fully grown adults now who have never experienced anything other than capes, cowls, quips, and blue laser beams shooting into the sky upwards of six or seven times every single year.
Indeed, telling someone who came of age with the Marvel Cinematic Universe that there was a time when superhero movies were a rarity, and most of them were nothing like their source material, is likely to make them smirk and raise an unconvinced eyebrow.
In truth, looking back at the superhero movies released in the 1990s, the decade before they started becoming Hollywood’s biggest cash cow, reveals an entirely different world. That decade featured three Batman sequels and Spawn, an adaptation of Todd McFarlane’s hell-spawned superhero. There were other comic book movies released, of course, but few fell neatly into the Marvel/DC superhero category. For example, there were the pulp-inspired heroes (The Shadow, The Phantom, Darkman, The Rocketeer), the 2000AD sci-fi tales (Judge Dredd, Tank Girl), a couple of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, plus the independent comic adaptations, The Mask and The Crow.
Clearly, Hollywood knew comics were ripe for adaptation, but it hadn’t fully embraced the superhero yet. That is, until that decade’s most important superhero movie came out: 1998’s Blade. Wesley Snipes’ ultra-gory and action-packed martial arts horror extravaganza was the first true big-screen adaptation of a Marvel character, and its success convinced 20th Century Fox to pull the trigger on the movie that eventually kickstarted the modern superhero boom, for better or worse.
Prior to Blade, Hollywood thought the vitriolic reception to 1997’s Batman & Robin meant that audiences weren’t interested in superheroes anymore. This was why Fox, who had optioned the rights to Marvel’s X-Men universe in 1994 and installed Bryan Singer as director in 1996, was still hedging its bets slightly on the project. It was mired in development hell for much of the late ’90s, with endless script rewrites and studio cold feet leading to a green light never materialising. Then Blade came along, and Fox finally decided it was time for the world to meet the X-Men.
It’s hard to write about Singer’s first X-Men movie in isolation, not only because his reputation was ruined when multiple troubling accusations of sexual assault came to light, but also because so much has directly stemmed from the film in the last 25 years. For starters, it led to 12 sequel/spinoff movies, including the massively popular Wolverine and Deadpool solo movies. But, when X-Men, a property that was virtually unknown to non-geek audiences, became the ninth highest-grossing movie of 2000, it proved to Hollywood there was gold in those superhero hills if it did what it had refused to do up until that point: take the source comics, and their fans, seriously.
Singer’s X-Men was a sci-fi blockbuster featuring superpowered characters in black leather, sure, but it was also a parable about prejudice and tolerance, which spoke to several marginalised communities in a profound way. In fact, these themes of mutant characters fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them are precisely what convinced Singer, a gay man, to accept the directing job.
Over the years, the franchise admittedly became increasingly silly and convoluted. However, the power of that first film, which opens with a young Erik Lehnsherr’s powers of magnetism manifesting when he is tragically separated from his parents at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, can’t be understated. Audiences hadn’t seen a superhero movie with this kind of thematic depth before, and even if they loved the film more for its action sequences and memorable characters, the thematic underpinnings subconsciously told people, “This isn’t a throwaway adventure aimed at kids”.
As more superhero movies followed in the wake of X-Men, including Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, and the early entries in the MCU, such as Iron Man and Thor, the drive to ground superheroes in reality gave way to a desire to embrace their inherent comic book qualities.
This is why X-Men, a modestly budgeted blockbuster with a handful of action sequences and a 104-minute runtime, might look quaint in comparison to the wildly over-the-top CGI-fuelled spectacles of Avengers: Endgame or James Gunn’s Superman, which have no compunction about translating four-colour superheroics to the big screen almost verbatim. But this is simply the natural path of a genre becoming so ubiquitous that it has to change and reinvent itself periodically, and none of it would have been possible without Singer proving people would show up for this stuff if it were made with care, respect, and ambition.
So, in the end, should X-Men be thanked for being patient zero for the superhero industrial complex, or condemned as the film that inadvertently ruined cinema? Well, purely from a bean-counting perspective, most Hollywood studio executives would likely admit that the movie business may have been in serious trouble at certain times without the reliable box office figures generated by superheroes. However, this over-reliance on superheroes has obviously led to a grim landscape for original filmmaking in the last decade or so, as the likes of Martin Scorsese will only too gladly spotlight for the world.
Ultimately, though, if you analyse the movie on its own terms, separate from anything that came after, it’s indisputably a great watch, and one that perfectly demonstrates what is compelling about superhero storytelling when it is anchored to real themes and emotion. And hey, it’s probably unfair to blame the dismal likes of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Morbius, and Justice League solely on Singer’s pioneering incarnation of Marvel’s ‘Merry Mutants’. It deserves more credit than that.
