Ranking X-Men Movies

It's the penultimate day of February and the last day of ranking stuff.  Hooray!  I'm all out of transitions, so let's just rank some X-Men movies.  But not Wolverine or Deadpool ones since those are solo movies.  We don't want this to be too long, do we?

7.  The Last Stand:  This tried to combine a recent (at the time) comics story of a mutant "cure" with the classic Dark Phoenix story.  And the result...meh.  The heart of the Dark Phoenix story was Jean and Scott's relationship, but since James Marsden was bailing on the franchise to jump to Superman Returns with Bryan Singer--and since Hugh Jackman was way more popular--they gave Scott's story to Wolverine.  And pretty much just have Jean-Grey stand around and kill people.  She kills Professor X and with Rogue written out early and Nightcrawler MIA, there wasn't much of the traditional X-Men team that people wanted to see.  We didn't pay to see Kitty Pride, Iceman, and stupid American Colossus!  It doesn't really introduce any interesting new mutants either, which is hard considering there are like hundreds of mutants they could have introduced instead of...whoever.

6.  Dark Phoenix:  This wasn't a terrible movie and as I mentioned when I reviewed it, it was a more faithful adaptation of the comic book story than the previous entry on this list.  The biggest problem was the Fox/Disney merger made this a lame duck movie.  It's no surprise that people didn't really care when they knew that in a few years the whole thing was going to be rebooted to be added to the MCU. Other than that it was kind of rushed.  Like I said before, the comics had years to build relationships that were given one movie and part of this one to build.  It just doesn't work.

5.  Apocalypse:  The problem for this movie is that it's pretty dumb (I mean Jean-Grey and Magneto put the mansion back together like it's made of fucking Legos) and it's not "fun" enough to get a pass like Thor: Ragnarok.  For whatever reason they decided to wait until the third movie of the soft reboot franchise to introduce (or re-introduce) some of the most popular characters like Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Jean-Grey.  Magneto kills thousands of people, but he's still a good guy at heart, so let's let him go!  Sure, great idea.

4.  First Class:  The soft reboot of the X-Men franchise.  It jumps back to the 60s to focus on a younger Xavier and Magneto.  Other than Mystique and Beast, the roster was composed of lesser characters like Havok, Banshee, and...um...there was someone else, right?  Emma Frost is largely wasted as a henchman of Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw and how Xavier gets paralyzed is sort of lame.  But I do really like the SR-71 they use to get around in, though I think it was a little early for that to exist.

3.  X2:  X-Men United:  A lot of people liked this better than the first one.  Not me!  I thought it was really packed with too many characters, so that there wasn't much for some of them to do.  What was the point of Rogue, Iceman, and "Pyro" for instance?  Having Xavier and Magneto's squads join forces just made for less for some characters to do.  Jean-Grey's sacrifice seemed kind of pointless; couldn't she just lift the plane from inside or something?  Or why couldn't she let Nightcrawler get her after they broke away? 

2.  Days of Future Past:  Eyeing some of that MCU money, this was the soft reboot of the soft reboot.  It brought back the stars of the original X-Men franchise like Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellan with the stars of the previous movie like Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, and Michael Fassbender.  In the two comics it was Kitty Pride who went back in time, but of course it has to be Wolverine in the movie since he's the most popular character.  Instead of stopping Senator Kelly from getting the government to use Sentinels, they have to stop Trask from building the Sentinels.  But then the final act becomes about Magneto lifting a stadium and trying to kill Nixon until Mystique stops him.  It was a pretty clever way to bring together the two eras of the franchise; it's just too bad the movies that followed didn't really live up to it.

1.  X-Men:  The OG X-Men movie!  Sorry, I just love the simplicity of this first movie in the franchise.  The number of characters on both sides is still pretty small, so it allowed the movie to develop some relationships, like the love triangle between Jean-Grey-Scott-Logan.  It could have developed the bad guys besides Magneto a little more, but for 2000, just 3 years removed from Batman & Robin, it was a revelation.  Blade got the ball rolling, but this brought the modern superhero movie to the masses with its PG-13 rating. And a shredded Hugh Jackman hanging off the Statue of Liberty.  Give it some respect.

There you go, that's the list.  Now maybe I should rank my ranking lists...