Throwback Thursday: X-Men

The superhero genre comes full circle with the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past this Memorial Day weekend, as the latest installment in the ever-expanding mutant franchise works as a sequel to both prequel First Class and trilogy-capper The Last Stand via the narrative wonders of time travel. It’s sometimes forgotten that the original X-Men, all the way back in July 2000, kickstarted this whole comic-book craze that’s been alternately delighting and frustrating audiences for close to fifteen years; though Superman and Batman both went through four-movie runs long before then, their equally terrible fourth films (Superman IV: The Quest for Peace in 1987 and Batman & Robin ten years later) killed off any interest in cinematic superheroes for the time being – often only a couple years, until the next franchise starter made things exciting again. But X-Men was the first time that a B-level superhero (or in this case, superhero team) was made into an A-level movie, at least in terms of box office grosses – although characters such as Blade, The Phantom, and The Shadow had been adapted to the big screen, none had the same cultural impact as Wolverine, Cyclops, and the rest. The subsequent success of Bryan Singer’s gritty, realistic opener thus paved the way not just for adaptations of Spider-Man, Hulk, and Iron Man, but even Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins reboot and the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re currently blessed/cursed with. In this sense, it’s one of the most influential films of the century, if only from a purely commercial perspective.