The box office history of the X-Men movies

There was a time when it was risky to make live-action Marvel movies. In an era before Rocket Raccoon, Spider-Man, and Deadpool, such titles were defined by Howard the Duck and an unreleased Fantastic Four movie. Then Blade hit in 1998 and everything changed. Suddenly, all bets were off. Live-action Marvel films could be big business, especially since the cash-strapped comics giant let film rights to big characters like Spider-Man and Captain America go for cheap in the mid-90s. Now everyone across Hollywood had their fingers in the Marvel Comics world. Leading the charge into this post-Blade world would be X-Men in 2000.

24 years later, it’s clear X-Men did something right financially. After all, Hugh Jackman’s still playing Wolverine this summer in Deadpool & Wolverine. That feature recently dropped a commercial teasing a fight between that Canadian superhero and Tyler Mane’s Sabretooth from the original X-Men. At the 21st century's dawn, though, uncertainty hovered over this movie. That emotion spurred the start of the X-Men’s box office history.

When X-Men dropped into theaters in July 2000, it wasn't just Marvel Comics movies needing some consistent hits. Distributor 20h Century Fox also craved a bit of a financial boost. International box office numbers for Titanic and distributing The Phantom Menace brought the studio lots of moolah at the end of the 90s. However, the studio came in fourth place at the domestic box office in 1998 among major studios. Even Phantom Menace wasn't enough to keep the studio from sinking to fifth place in 1999 among major studios. With Fox Animation Studios shutting down just a few weeks before X-Men’s premiere, the pressure was on. This mutant movie needed to perform.

Fox executives could breathe a mighty sigh of relief once X-Men's opening weekend box office figures rolled in. Grossing $54.4 million, X-Men had the sixth-biggest domestic opening weekend in history at the time of its release. For comparison sake, the current sixth-biggest domestic opening weekend in history is the $208.8 million of Jurassic World. Impressively, X-Men also narrowly edged out Batman Forever's $52.7 million domestic debut to score the biggest superhero movie opening ever. Fox’s financial failure Titan A.E. from the same summer receded in everyone’s mind. All anyone could talk about was how X-Men had started a new franchise after it grossed $157.2 million domestically.

Three years later, it was time for X2: X-Men United. Rather than opening in X-Men's mid-July slot, X2 opted for the first weekend of May. That launchpad was where Spider-Man thrived during 2002. Over its opening weekend, X2 scored the biggest Fox opening weekend in history (beating out the $80 million bow of Attack of the Clones from the previous summer) with an $85.5 million debut. At the time of its release, that was the fourth-biggest domestic launch in history. Two weeks later, it would become the fifth-biggest when The Matrix Reloaded opened to $91.7 million. X2 also became only the 48th movie ever to crack $200 million domestically. Happily for its distributor, X2 was only the eighth Fox movie ever to cross that threshold.

 X-Men was no fluke building off the hype of Blade. X2 further solidified that the age of Marvel cinema had arrived.

With all this hype swirling around Hugh Jackman’s bulging biceps, inevitably, X-Men: The Last Stand rode into theaters with an avalanche of goodwill. Over its three-day opening weekend, The Last Stand grossed $102.7 million, the fourth biggest opening weekend in history. It was also only the fifth time in history that a motion picture exceeded $100 million on opening weekend. Most importantly, in just three days, The Last Stand surpassed Star Trek: First Contact as the highest-grossing live-action Kelsey Grammer had ever appeared in (Transformers: Age of Extinction would later take away that record). The box office blues were NOT a-callin' The Last Stand. Fox executives were undoubtedly eating lots of tossed salad and scrambled eggs at that and other box office victories.

That massive opening did come with one caveat. The Last Stand will forever be the first $100+ million domestic opener to gross under $250 million in its overall run. A bit more common today, this strange sight was down to the absolutely abysmal word-of-mouth the film generated. Fox was still seeing sizeable numbers for this saga…but was there further longevity in this saga? Would subsequent X-Men movies score pre-release extreme excitement after The Last Stand? It was a daunting question that could inspire one inevitable response from Fox executives…”mercy!”

The year is now 2009. This wasn't just the year of hit TV shows like In the Motherhood, Trust Me, and Kings. Three years had passed since X-Men: The Last Stand. Call this franchise's gestating time between installments a 2013 Easton Corbin song, because the 2000s X-Men movies came out every three years like "Clockwork." This time, it would be X-Men Origins: Wolverine dropping into multiplexes in May 2009. Centering the action on Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, in theory, should've been a guaranteed one-way ticket to new box office heights.

However, between The Last Stand and Wolverine, though, the superhero movie landscape changed forever. Iron Man launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe in May 2008. Three months later The Dark Knight became the biggest superhero film ever by a massive margin. Following up The Last Stand’s negative reputation would’ve always been challenging. Functioning as the next act after those game-changing 2008 blockbusters…that would be extra tough. The increased blockbuster competition was reflected in where Wolverine's opening weekend stood on the all-time charts compared to its predecessors. Each of the previous X-Men movies had opened within the top six opening weekends of all time. Circa May 2009, Wolverine had the 19th-biggest domestic opening, roughly $500,000 behind X2.

Though Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo dubbed this debut “a roaring success” considering Wolverine was an origin prequel movie, the incredibly frontloaded nature of this solo vehicle made it the second lowest grossing X-Men movie ever domestically. Wolverine's $179 million domestic total was, like The Last Stand, incredibly contingent on its opening weekend. Audiences were excited for new X-Men movies on opening weekend. However, these titles weren't lasting long in the pop culture consciousness. Into this status quo, a radical prequel bloomed. June 2011's X-Men: First Class was built to launch a new series of X-Men titles. These films would occupy the past and focused on younger characters.

This Matthew Vaughn directorial effort got much better reviews than nearly all previous X-Men films. However, its domestic total only reached $146.4 million. Far from a terrible haul, it was still beneath all previous X-Men movies. This included the first feature released 11 years earlier with a significantly lower budget. When 2013's The Wolverine also reached a new domestic box office low ($132.5 million), an obvious message emerged: moviegoers need change. The creative team behind these merry mutant movies had been preparing such a radical new offering long before The Wolverine’s box office total came in. 2012’s The Avengers showed that audiences craved expansive team-up superhero movies. 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past would fit that bill nicely.

This feature combined the First Class and original X-Men casts for an adventure spanning the 1970s and a dystopic future. That did the trick for getting the X-Men back in the box office limelight. The sheer volume of 2014 superhero and blockbusters ensured that Days of Future Past never had a chance of cracking the top ten biggest domestic debuts of all time like the initial three X-Men movies had. However, its $233.9 million North American haul was narrowly the second-biggest X-Men movie gross ever in this territory (The Last Stand made only $400,000 more). Better yet, Days of Future Past finally made the X-Men a big deal internationally. Before 2014, no X-Men title had exceeded $460 million worldwide. Days of Future Past, meanwhile, made a little over $414 million alone internationally.

Ironically, Deadpool, the February 2016 movie Fox executives initially wanted nothing to do with, would become the X-Men saga’s biggest financial triumph. Scoring $363 million domestically and $781.9 million worldwide, it was by far the biggest X-Men movie up to that point. The staggering success of that irreverent comedy took the whole world by surprise. After all, it far surpassed all previous Ryan Reynolds star vehicles and similar R-rated comedies. That haul would be extra impressive as 2016 continued. Three months after Deadpool, traditional X-Men tentpole X-Men: Apocalypse opened over Memorial Day weekend. An expansive blockbuster outing featuring the casual destruction of Australia and Oscar Isaac in blue makeup, this title cost $178 million to produce and took in $542.5 million worldwide.

Not a bad haul, especially considering its nearly $400 million international haul that further cemented the X-Men films as finally being a global draw. The days of even X-Men: The Last Stand failing to crack $250 million were firmly in the past. However, its domestic numbers were drastically down from Days of Future Past. Apocalypse only grossed $155 million in this territory. Despite a substantial increase in scope (with action meant to evoke the Avengers movies), Apocalypse only made $9 million more in North America than First Class five years earlier. Days of Future Past hadn’t given the saga a permanent domestic box office boost. Instead, the mainline X-Men movies had reverted to their pre-2014 box office numbers once more.

20th Century Fox unleashed Logan onto the world nine months after Apocalypse. This lower-budgeted R-rated title (costing $127 million to produce) followed Deadpool as an unorthodox hit for the franchise. Despite being a gritter and more grounded movie than Apocalypse, Logan narrowly made more than that blockbuster internationally (both grossed $389 million in foreign territories). Logan also became only the third non-Deadpool X-Men movie to crack $200 million domestically. Finally, a solo Wolverine movie turned into a flat-out box office hit. When the X-Men movies delivered something new into the superhero movie landscape, audiences flocked to the theater. More rudimentary superhero antics like Apocalypse inspired shrugs.

Eight months after Logan, a Hollywood apocalypse transpired that forever affected this franchise. 20th Century Fox (along with other News Corp. media entities like FX, significant shares of Hulu, and National Geographic, to name a few) was gobbled up by Disney. The studio's future fell into a tailspin. Its 2018 and especially 2019 slate got seismically toppled. Not even the X-Men movies could withstand this corporate carnage. The New Mutants was planned to be the next X-Men spin-off movie. However, its scheduled April 2018 release date never came to be. Dark Phoenix, the next mainline X-Men title, scored a November 2018 launch. However, it would experience two further postponements until its final June 2019 date.

All that uncertainty stemming from how Disney would handle Fox didn't just affect X-Men features in production. It also led to several X-Men movies in development getting axed (Channing Tatum's cursed Gambit movie, for instance). In the middle of all this pandemonium, Deadpool 2 opened in theaters on May 18, 2018. Premiering three weeks after Avengers: Infinity War didn’t lead to this blockbuster getting the cold shoulder from audiences. Deadpool 2 still made a mighty $324.5 million domestically and $786.3 million worldwide. The latter total briefly made the feature the biggest R-rated movie ever worldwide (Joker would later assume that crown).

Deadpool 2's success further solidified how lucrative X-Men movies were in the summertime. For nine of the 18 summers from 2000 to 2018, the X-Men franchise had not only delivered a new movie. This saga unleashed a new motion picture that grossed at least $132 million domestically. Six of those nine features cracked $150+ million domestically. That impressive streak would, unfortunately, come to an end the following year. This is when Dark Phoenix finally dropped into theaters the first weekend of June. Simon Kinberg directorial debut was one of the first 20th Century Fox titles released by Disney. The Mouse House’s absorption of the studio closed in March 2019. Now Mickey Mouse was handling a Marvel title that didn't hail from Kevin Feige's brain. The film’s pre-release buzz didn't consist of excitement from moviegoers over potential cameos or character arc culminations like other superhero movies.

Instead, Dark Phoenix couldn't shake toxic buzz stemming from extensive reshoots, an overhauled third act, and reports that the Disney/Fox merger annihilated a coherent marketing campaign. Eventually, the $200 million budgeted Dark Phoenix would only make $65.8 million domestically. The X-Men movies started out delivering opening weekends that were among the biggest of all time. Dark Phoenix concluded the saga with a lifetime domestic haul that barely exceeded X-Men: Apocalypse's opening weekend. A $246.3 million worldwide haul didn't help dilute the feature's excessive losses. The New Mutants would firmly wrap up this iteration of the X-Men in August 2020. Unsurprisingly since it was dumped into theaters when COVID-19 was raging and many theaters were still closed, New Mutants only grossed $47.5 million worldwide.

To look at the history of the X-Men movies at the box office doesn’t just mean examining the box office pull of Will.i.am as John Wraith or Tye Sheridan saying the “f-word”…like that. It’s also to see the evolution of the American blockbuster over 20 years. Back in July 2000, hardly any movies had opened to $60+ million domestically. $100+ million openers in North America were a far-off fantasy for the future. As the blockbuster landscape got more crowded, the grosses of these features became increasingly erratic.

A lavish title with lots of VFX like X-Men: The Last Stand couldn’t cut it by 2016. You needed more to stand out in the marketplace. This is why the biggest final X-Men films were R-rated anomalies like Deadpool and Logan. Such titles didn't just offer something new. They also established themselves as standalone movies accessible to anyone. Compare that to the mish-mash of mythos and character returns dominating Apocalypse’s crowded marketing.

A new era of X-Men cinema is about to begin with Deadpool & Wolverine. Currently, projections for the movie's opening weekend suggest it could exceed $160 million on opening weekend. That would be more than the entire domestic run of Apocalypse in just three days. Meanwhile, the incredibly popular 2024 Disney+ program X-Men ’97 has reaffirmed how enduringly popular those merry mutants are. Both properties are following in the footsteps of those original X-Men movies that frequently upended box office records like Wolverine slicing down baddies. Now if only all those box office victories could've helped Hank McCoy figure out what to do with those tossed salads and scrambled eggs…