It might be strange to remember now, but there was a time when the summer box office wasn't
dominated by comic book movies.
How far back can you trace the origins of our current superheroic movie landscape?
It just might start in the year 2000, when X-Men changed everything.
Looking at the opening sequence of a film like 1997's Batman & Robin, it's the hero
who's immediately set up as the main character.
In this case, it's both Batman and Robin.
"Chicks dig the car.
This is why Superman works alone."
Everything about it is cheesy and over the top, and then X-Men came along and did something
completely different.
The film opens in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944 with a boy who, separated from his
parents, makes a desperate attempt to reopen the camp's metal gates with his superhuman
powers.
The boy is a young Erik Lehnsherr, who would go on to become the film's primary antagonist,
Magneto.
But we don't see him as a villain - at least not at first.
We see him as a child subjected to an unimaginable horror.
When it is revealed that the child has grown into the villain, it's as a sympathetic one.
Fast forward to the present, and it's clear that the trend of creating sympathetic villains
hasn't gone away.
X-Men played a huge role in introducing the idea of a villainous monster you could actually
care about.
This also blurred the line between good and evil.
While Professor X advocates for peace, Magneto is convinced the only outcome is war, but
ultimately, they both want the same thing: for mutantkind to be raised up from oppression.
In his review of the film, Roger Ebert said:
"X-Men is at least not a manic editing frenzy for atrophied attention spans.
It's restrained and introspective for a superhero epic…"
In fact, much of X-Men's hour and 44 minute runtime is spent on character development,
introducing audiences to the main players, explaining their special abilities, and delving
into their personal struggles against bigotry and discrimination.
Fight scenes and action sequences are there, but they're not the main focus of the film.
"So read my mind."
"I'd rather not."
"Come on, you afraid you might like it?"
It might have something to do with the fact that director Bryan Singer had never read
the comics as a kid.
Singer told the Los Angeles Times in 2016 that it wasn't until he started watching the
animated series later on in life that he began to form an attachment to the characters.
He explained:
"When I suddenly come across this universe that's all about misfits and outcasts who
become superheroes, it intrigued me.
I started to figure a way to tell this story not just to the fan base but to a wider audience."
The focus of the film became a social message, as opposed to the "big stuff" audiences had
come to expect from action blockbusters.
Magneto wasn't the only X-Men character to get his on-screen introduction via a relatable,
human backstory.
In Mississippi, we see 17-year-old Marie accidentally put her boyfriend into a coma after she kisses
him for the first time.
Regardless of the continuity between her portrayal in the original comics and in the 2000 film,
Marie - later Rogue - wasn't introduced as a fully-fledged misfit superhero.
She was our point-of-view character, a regular person, with not-so-regular problems.
Bryan Singer told the Los Angeles Times that he treated the characters in X-Men with, quote
"the same seriousness" as those in The Usual Suspects.
That legitimacy was crucial to making a satisfying movie, he explained, saying:
"You can't just take a bunch of characters and throw them together and stir them up in
a soup and hope that it works."
From the beginning, X-Men worked to set itself apart from its comic movie predecessors via
its tone and approach to storytelling.
Bryan Singer went into the movie from a standpoint of really wanting it to be a serious film
set in a fantastic world, but he was also keenly aware of how audiences would feel going
into a so-called "comic movie."
In an interview with MTV News, Hugh Jackman, who played Wolverine throughout the franchise,
said that Singer was so dedicated to making X-Men stand out as more than just a comic
film that he wouldn't even allow comic books onto the set, thereby effectively making source
material contraband.
"Hey, where are all my comic books?”
“Oh, those dreadful things?
I gave those away."
Jackman went on to explain:
"He really wanted to take comic book characters seriously as real, three-dimensional characters.
People who don't understand these comics might think they're two-dimensional."
The three biggest films of the 2000 summer box office were headlined by Tom Cruise, Russell
Crowe, and George Clooney, respectively.
At that point in time, all three had proven themselves as leading men.
X-Men's stars were a couple of actors who were in their '60s -- a pre-Gandalf Ian McKellen,
and Patrick Stewart, then best known for telling Wesley Crusher to shut up in Star Trek: TNG.
“Shut up, Wesley!”
The two leads were supported by a mostly unknown cast who had done some TV work and a teen
horror flick here and there.
Halle Berry had done some high-profile movie work, but she wouldn't go on to win her Oscar
for Monster's Ball or become a box office force of her own for a couple more years.
Speaking with MTV News, Hugh Jackman said he went into the audition as if it weren't
a real one, because he thought Dougray Scott was already going to play the role of Wolverine.
"I think I was sent up there just to kind of send a message back to Mission: Impossible
II like, you better hurry up because we're going to start looking at other people.
I didn't think it was a real audition."
What X-Men proved, however, is that you didn't need a big star to sell a film to audiences.
Endgame marked a high for Marvel Studios, and for the comic film genre, but chances
are it wouldn't exist had X-Men not first paved the way.
In 1996, Marvel filed for bankruptcy and sold off the cinematic rights to several of its
properties in an effort to stay afloat.
20th Century Fox picked up the rights to the X-Men, and although the movie was a success
at the box office, Marvel wound up with zero to show for it.
Two years later, the same would happen with Sony's Spider-Man, and again, Marvel would
walk away with nothing.
In 2005, after X-Men and Spider-Man had proven how successful a comic film could be if done
properly, Marvel gambled everything they had to launch their own production studio, with
Iron Man ushering in the Marvel Cinematic Universe three years later.
Love it or hate it, X-Men was built to begin a franchise, and it made major use of a cliffhanger
after the film's storyline was wrapped up.
It's a common thing now, but back then films didn't typically rely on such gimmicks.
The ending of the film sees Professor X visits Magneto in his plastic cell, where Magneto
shares his plan to continue his fight.
It's obvious this isn't the real end of the story and that there's a definitive plan for
more.
And now, we watch comic films and actually expect a tease for more.
“I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative."
By the time X-Men arrived in theaters, it had been over a decade since Tim Burton's
first Batman movie had set the box office on fire.
In the time since, superhero movies had hardly been shown to be a guaranteed path to blockbuster
success.
Even Batman's sequels had turned into a game of diminishing returns.
"What killed the dinosaurs?
The ICE AGE!"
2000's X-Men proved two things: the first is that comic book adaptations didn't have
to be campy.
It also proved that comic films could be profitable.
Longtime X-Men comics writer Chris Claremont told Polygon in 2019:
"Up until then everybody had looked on superhero films as losers.
Then, the X-Men rolled in with a nine-figure opening weekend, which nobody saw coming…
20 years later we are in the world of today with Black Panther pulling in three Oscars
and Into the Spider-Verse getting Best Animated Film."
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