X-Men Was The First Superhero Team Movie That Foreshadowed The Avengers

If it weren't for X-Men, there would be no Avengers because Bryan Singer's movie introduced audiences to the concept of the superhero team. Prior to X-Men, the biggest superhero movies were about Superman and Batman, although the Dark Knight got helpers in Robin and Batgirl in Joel Schumacher's films. But X-Men and its sequels introduced an astounding number of mutant characters and it also established comic book staples like their headquarters, the X-Mansion, and the X-Jet. Crucially, X-Men pioneered the world-saving, dysfunctional superhero family that the Avengers ultimately became because Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was a producer on X-Men and took the lessons he learned to heart.

In Marvel's stories, superheroes don't always get along, and such personality conflicts were built into X-Men, especially Logan's rivalry with Cyclops because of their love triangle with Jean Grey. Wolverine openly mocked the X-Men's uniforms and codenames, flipped Cyclops the finger with one of his claws, and called him "a d*ck." In addition, while Magneto's goals were inherently malevolent, his hatred of humans was rooted in his past as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, which is a heartwrenching origin story for the X-Men's greatest villain. But it was X-Men's trailblazing of Marvel's complex characters and relationships that ultimately led to audiences taking sides between Tony Stark's Team Iron Man and Steve Rogers's Team Cap in Captain America: Civil War and the dozens of heroes thrillingly teaming up in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

X-Men's Uneven Franchise Had A Sad Ending

After X-Men: The Last Stand, the X-Men franchise experienced incredible highs and lows, with immensely popular spinoffs like 2006's Deadpool and 2007's Logan making up for embarrassing misfires like X-Men: Origins Wolverine. But in the 2010s, the mainline X-Men movies experienced a renaissance with Matthew Vaughn's Cold War spy thriller X-Men: First Class rebooting the saga in 2011 with a younger cast, followed by Bryan Singer returning to direct the fantastic X-Men: Days of Future Past, which brought the two generations of X-Men together.

In a post-Avengers movie marketplace, X-Men proved to still be competitive and relevant, although, sadly it wasn't to last. Fans regarded 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse as a cartoonishly overblown disappointment, and writer-director Simon Kinberg's second stab at adapting The Dark Phoenix Saga failed spectacularly. 2019's Dark Phoenix is an unfortunate final nail in the original X-Men franchise's coffin, especially now that the mutants are due to be rebooted and integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming years. But while the X-Men's tarnished legacy is too often remembered for its mistakes, stripped down to its base essence, X-Men is about hope. The original X-Men film's true success is that it gave Marvel movies the hope they needed for a better future, which fans have enjoyed ever since.