Do You Think The X-Men Franchise Was Overshadowed by The OG Spider-man Films & The MCU?

[Ctfxcwatcher]

So a buddy and I had a convo yesterday about this. We started talking about Superhero films and eventually got to the X-men. His claim was that even though he always felt that the X-men were good, they were never true crowd-pleasers. He believes those films always appealed to their fanbase but never really got the general public to stan them like Spider-man in 2002 did and The Avengers did in 2012. He then gave another example of TDK also taking away their shine.

Do you agree with my friend?

I personally don't because those films launched the modern superhero frenzy so they must have been crowd-pleasing right?

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Yep. Not to say they weren't successes, but compared to Raimi Spider-Man, TDKT, and the MCU? Yeah, I don't think there is any question that those left X-Men in the dust from a pop culture standpoint. X-Men continually seemed to be on the cusp of something great, but would then stumble and not each the heights the franchise could have.

 

[Detective Conan]

One of my favorite podcasters Sean Gerber(Modern Myth Media and MarvelStudiosNews) one time on a podcast described the Fox X-Men franchise as the “bronze medalist” of the superhero genre that has always played third fiddle to other comic book properties like Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, TDKT, and of course the MCU, and I have to agree with him.

But the MCU will take the X-Men to new heights popularity wise. When I was growing up the X-Men were unquestionably the top dog of the superhero comics. They were the biggest thing in comics but now they’ve lost their shine, and have been overshadowed in popularity by other IP but now that Marvel has the rights back Marvel will return them to their former glory. Just wait the MCU Uncanny X-Men will create a mutant renaissance.

 

[Zarex]

The One-Two punch of TLS and XMO:W killed much of my enthusiasm in the X-Men series. And while Fox made a decent comeback attempt with FC, Feige and company were building towards the Avengers during that same time. And I found it difficult to be enthusiastic about a reboot.

Fox may have been able to maintain enthusiasm in the series if they moved forward to X-4 with a new mutant crew and explored more fantastic environments. But poor planning, bad creative choices and tough competition killed it.

 

[Ctfxcwatcher]

One of my favorite podcasters Sean Gerber(Modern Myth Media and MarvelStudiosNews) one time on a podcast described the Fox X-Men franchise as the “bronze medalist” of the superhero genre that has always played third fiddle to other comic book properties like Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, TDKT, and of course the MCU, and I have to agree with him.

But the MCU will take the X-Men to new heights popularity wise. When I was growing up the X-Men were unquestionably the top dog of the superhero comics. They were the biggest thing in comics but now they’ve lost their shine, and have been overshadowed in popularity by other IP but now that Marvel has the rights back Marvel will return them to their former glory. Just wait the MCU Uncanny X-Men will create a mutant renaissance.

very interesting and I agree with your 2nd paragraph. For me in the 90s it was only about the x-men and Spiderman. I barely heard of the Avengers. Its kind of sad how things have changed because if we walk down the street and ask the average person to name a Marvel hero I think they would immediately name someone from the MCU like Cap and Iron Man. Flashback 20 years ago and its the opposite. But like you, I am optimistic about the future and I hope they can return to glory because they are too iconic not to.

 

[psylockolussus]

Yes. The boX office numbers don't lie.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

They were totally overshadowed.

But that’s what happens when you strip away everything that makes the team exciting, and give them black leather suits and paste Wolverine everywhere and not giving any other characters focus.

 

[Fincher]

The aren't at the top of the Marvel food chain, but to be fair, a lot of movie series don't manage to spawn twelve films.

 

[xrs13]

Oh they were completely overshadowed, but I have always wondered if there is something to the fact the X-Men were misfits and represented the minorities in modern life. I know comic sales for x-men were the highest of all but a comic readership against a film viewership is something very different.

I always thought of the Avengers as the college jock type of group whilst the X-Men felt more like the smart kids who were picked on but actually knew their stuff.

A generalisation I know. But it still raises the question as to whether the general film audience cares enough about the "minority" as opposed to seeing the college jocks doing well. It clearly showed to me at least where the x-men films didn't perform as well domestically but did internationally.

Theres still a massive market for them to have and they will become the No1 film franchise again, but you can already see it where people are hyping to an Avengers Vs X-Men film or X-Men appearing in Avengers films. Not so much the other way around.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

Oh they were completely overshadowed, but I have always wondered if there is something to the fact the X-Men were misfits and represented the minorities in modern life. I know comic sales for x-men were the highest of all but a comic readership against a film viewership is something very different.

I always thought of the Avengers as the college jock type of group whilst the X-Men felt more like the smart kids who were picked on but actually knew their stuff.

A generalisation I know. But it still raises the question as to whether the general film audience cares enough about the "minority" as opposed to seeing the college jocks doing well. It clearly showed to me at least where the x-men films didn't perform as well domestically but did internationally.

Theres still a massive market for them to have and they will become the No1 film franchise again, but you can already see it where people are hyping to an Avengers Vs X-Men film or X-Men appearing in Avengers films. Not so much the other way around.

I honestly don’t think it’s even that deep. I feel that we all came in a X-Men movie wanting this:



But instead we got them:



Just dull and then on top of that, they’re not like the characters from the comics and cartoons that we all know and love. FOX just googled a bunch of people, found out what powers they had and centered them around Wolverine.

That’s why I say yeah we’ve had all these good Wolverine and Deadpool movies but we have yet to have a real X-Men movie.

 

[SumT]

yeah, that visual comparision pretty much told it all.

The movies never ever looked appealing to general audience. Plain and simple.
And if we then take into account the actual movies where Wolverine was always presented as the most awesome mutant, 'the badass' 'the greatest', the most dialogue, the most scenes, the best action... while all the other x-men were/looked sad, crying, screaming, captured, bored, out of the action, silent, etc... well, what do u expect the audience to feel? lol. Excitement for the next movie? hype?

Fox, Bryan, Simon and co. never pushed the X-Men to feel exciting, appealing and with mass appeal, like all the animated shows did. They just put a big limit to their own franchise. So the results arent surprising.

When characters like Aquaman, Black Panther and even Antman made more money than most x-men movies, you just know the studio definetly did 'something' wrong.

 

[babykhris]

The aren't at the top of the Marvel food chain, but to be fair, a lot of movie series don't manage to spawn twelve films.

But the reason it spawned 12 films was because FOX seemed to only care about keeping the rights away from Marvel and neglected quality.

 

[Zarex]

I honestly don’t think it’s even that deep. I feel that we all came in a X-Men movie wanting this:

View attachment 34497

But instead we got them:

View attachment 34498

Just dull and then on top of that, they’re not like the characters from the comics and cartoons that we all know and love. FOX just googled a bunch of people, found out what powers they had and centered them around Wolverine.

That’s why I say yeah we’ve had all these good Wolverine and Deadpool movies but we have yet to have a real X-Men movie.

Despite all of the Rat's many, many faults as a director and human being, I must admit he absolutely knocked it out of the park in casting Page and Grammer.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

Despite all of the Rat's many, many faults as a director and human being, I must admit he absolutely knocked it out of the park in casting Page and Grammer.

Besides Reynolds, Frasier Crane is the only Fox remnant I’d accept in the MCU.

 

[Zarex]

Besides Reynolds, Frasier Crane is the only Fox remnant I’d accept in the MCU.

I have to admit I didn't like the casting when it first was announced. Why are they putting an overweight sitcom actor into a superhero movie? But Kelsey brought a physical presence along with that glorious voice to the role. I totally bought that he was both the smartest guy in the room and one of the toughest.

I hadn't even thought about bringing Kelsey into the MCU, but I'd be up for it. Even if at this age he would mostly be a furry super scientist.

 

[Frodo]

I don't know If I would claim they were "overshadowed" by the other series at least in the early 00's. Everyone knows who the X Men are today and that's largely due to the first two films. That wasn't the case in the late 90s and in 2000 when the film came out.

At the time it, 2000, was thought of as , " new, different, and hip". The themes of outcasts and discrimination were praised by critics then, and if anything, critics seem to feel superhero films should be more like X Men and Blade than Batman and Robin.

To the GA, these characters were new, and seemed much more grounded and serious as opposed to alot of the campy and awful superhero films of the 80s and 90s.

The first film put the Wolverine character into pop culture much in the way the first Iron Man film raised his status to the GA. It made Hugh Jackman a house hold name.

The first two X Men films were popular with the GA back in the early 00s, so its not as if they were viewed as this fringe thing during the Raimi films in 2002-2005.

The Raimi films made more money and was more of a pop culture phenom because it was Spiderman, but both were popular at the same time.

If anything , it took Batman Begins awhile to gain steam , and it wasn't really till TDK in 2008 that that series really became what we know it as now.

By the time the MCU was coming along, circa 2008, the X Men films were running out of gas. They had a brief reprieves with XMFC ,XMDOFP, and The Wolverine, but the series was pretty much in its last gasps.

I think the bottom line is that the MCU was something different an unprecedented to the Superhero film genre ,and it pretty much took the oxygen out of the room for all of the other properties including the ASM Films, DC films, and the X Men films.

Fanboys today take for granted the idea of something like the MCU, but don't really appreciate how radical an idea it was in concept, let alone in execution, with time, money, casting, etc. especially in comparison to how previous superhero film franchises had been done before.

So yes, the MCU has achieved something that the X Men films didn't in that respect .

The MCU came at the right place in terms of technology, the right time in terms of Marvel having most of their properties back, The right people in terms of Feige and co, and the right moment in history, when geek culture was mainstream ,and superhero films were taken seriously, as opposed to being seen as "garbage" "kids stuff" as it was when the first X Men film was released.

The X Men was very much a product of the late 90s mentality about how to do a superhero film franchise. It was from a totally different context and time.

Unfortunately for the X Men, they stayed in that mindset when the paradigm was changing into what we have today. It was an old dog repeating the same old tricks .Of course , they had lots of other problems as well.

 

[Drizzle]

The X-Men movies were never as popular as Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy or The Avengers movies, but they still ranged from modest hits (the original movie, First Class) to massive successes (Days of Future Past, Deadpool 1 &2, Logan). I truly believe that at least four of the films in the franchise are among the best that the superhero genre has to offer. But critical praise and popularity aren't the same.

Wanna know a big reason why they weren't as popular as Spider-Man or The Avengers?

Merchandising. Or, lack thereof.

One of the reasons why the Spider-Man and MCU movies were/are so successful is because of their marketability towards kids. There is no shortage of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Panther, and Captain America toys, even if they're based on their comic incarnations and not necessarily MCU.

The X-Men movies though? It's a little bit more complicated. There was a line of action figures released to tie in to the first film back in 2000. They weren't bad, either. Almost like a precursor to Marvel Legends. They were a good mix of kid and collector friendly and there was even an electronic X-Jet and playsets to go with them. But after that, there was less and less merchandise for each sequel. X2 had a great line of action figures to go with it but there weren't a lot of characters available in it. The Last Stand had a line of comic-only figures to tie in with a few of the movie characters like Beast and Colossus showing up in some Marvel Legends waves. X-Men Origins Wolverine had a line of 4 inch figures (one of which made a cameo in Deadpool). And there wasn't much of a selection outside of figures either besides maybe some Wolverine play claws released during the first two movies.

After that, there was nothing. Everything from First Class onward had virtually no merchandise whatsoever save for a few items geared at adult collectors only from companies like Hot Toys. I believe there was something going on behind the scenes between Marvel and Fox over a merchandising dispute considering Fox would have received all profits from any X-Men movie merchandise being sold. At first this wasn't a problem since Marvel was selling its IPs to every studio under the sun, but once Disney acquired the company and Marvel Studios took off they naturally wouldn't have wanted Fox to see a dime of that money considering they were a direct competitor. Due to this, there was also a bit of a decrease in X-Men figures coming from Hasbro during this time compared to other Marvel characters like Spider-Man. It's a shame considering we're only just now seeing Marvel Legends versions of movie Deadpool, McAvoy Xavier and Fassbender Magneto now that Disney owns Fox, but better late than never I guess. Even so, those figures aren't aimed at kids anyway.

But I don't think kids really connected with the black leather clad X-Men of the films compared to the more colorful Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Captain America. Funny enough, I feel like I saw more kids in the screening of Deadpool 2 that I went to than any X-Men film I had seen in theaters since The Last Stand. To be honest, I don't think kids have really been overly excited about the X-Men since the days of the '90s cartoon. That's the only time in my life I remember there being more X-Men toys than Spider-Man toys on shelves.

Call me crazy but I think there's a real correlation there in terms of popularity among kids. They do make up a good number of the audience, after all.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

People to this day still know the X-Men from the cartoons and the comics, not just the FoxMen movies. So I respectfully disagree with that point. Especially millennials, we still hum the 90s cartoon theme song.

One of the first things me and my friends would talk about when we heard about sequels would be if this would finally be the movie where they get costumes or if Rogue would learn to fly and things like that.

 

[EnDz0n3]

Yes the Raimi films overshadowed the Singer films but the X-men numbers were nothing to sneeze at. Can you imagine if the Spidey films (which were staggered a year or two after the X-men movies) opened less? We would then be talking about what a disappointment those films were.

X-men opened in 2000 with $54Mil. At that time that was the highest non-sequel opening weekend of all time. In the summer of 2000, X-men was *the* talk of the town. That's a big deal. By X1's release in July, the only other movie that had opened higher was Tom Cruise's Mi:2 two months prior with $57Mil.

Spider-man two years later opened with a then-unheard of over $100Mil in just 3 days. You can say Spidey had the X-men beat all you want but you have to understand no other movie had ever opened *that* high: $114Mil.

Summer 2003 was the year the sequel to X-men faced off against the sequel to The Matrix. Everyone pegged Matrix Reloaded the winner even before either movie had come out. But X2 put up a fight opening with $86Mil vs. The Matrix Reloaded's $91Mil. But fans of the X-men heralded their movie's victory because X2 had a higher Rottentomatoes score and was generally more-liked than Reloaded (which has been described as "bad," "clunky" and "a disappointment"). The Matrix' success in 1999 all but guaranteed its sequel would be the most anticipated. X2 went toe-to-toe with Neo's Reloaded. Again, that's a big deal.

The X-men movies were a big deal in the 2000's.

 

[Iceman]

The aren't at the top of the Marvel food chain, but to be fair, a lot of movie series don't manage to spawn twelve films.

​

But the reason it spawned 12 films was because FOX seemed to only care about keeping the rights away from Marvel and neglected quality.

This is it. Most franchises (even the successful ones) don't have that many films in a short space of time, but Fox and Sony were under extreme pressure to always have something in the works or say goodbye to a valuable asset for nothing forever.

 

[Iceman]

Yep. Not to say they weren't successes, but compared to Raimi Spider-Man, TDKT, and the MCU? Yeah, I don't think there is any question that those left X-Men in the dust from a pop culture standpoint. X-Men continually seemed to be on the cusp of something great, but would then stumble and not each the heights the franchise could have.

Yeah. There's plenty of good stuff within the Fox film catalogue but overall they scratched the surface of what could have been achieved with the rights they had.

 

[Fincher]

This is it. Most franchises (even the successful ones) don't have that many films in a short space of time, but Fox and Sony were under extreme pressure to always have something in the works or say goodbye to a valuable asset for nothing forever.

Regardless, whether through their degree of success or there prolificness, I think they left more of an impression than some other series out there. I mean, it's not like if you brought the X-Men up, people would tend to say, "Oh, yeah, I forgot those existed." They're not...Divergent. I would liken them more to Star Trek compared to Star Wars, something that a lot of people don't care about, that wasn't the same level of box office smash, but they still knew they were there. Plus, you know, Deadpool. I guess we'll see in ten, twenty years how much people are still aware of them.

 

[Iceman]

Regardless, whether through their degree of success or there prolificness, I think they left more of an impression than some other series out there. I mean, it's not like if you brought the X-Men up, people would tend to say, "Oh, yeah, I forgot those existed." They're not...Divergent. I would liken them more to Star Trek compared to Star Wars, something that a lot of people don't care about, that wasn't the same level of box office smash, but they still knew they were there. Plus, you know, Deadpool. I guess we'll see in ten, twenty years how much people are still aware of them.

Star Trek compared to Star Wars seems like a good comparison. I’d agree with that.

 

[Frodo]

People to this day still know the X-Men from the cartoons and the comics, not just the FoxMen movies. So I respectfully disagree with that point. Especially millennials, we still hum the 90s cartoon theme song.

.

I think that depends on which people we're talking about. I would agree that people today know the cartoons and comics 20 years later. But if we're talking how the mainstream got to know who the X Men were, that wasn't from comics or even the cartoons if we're talking about the majority of the GA. That was from the first two films.

The X Men cartoon was popular with children, teens , kids, and comicbook fans in the 90s.

But in terms of the X Men fully becoming a part of pop culture much in the way Iron Man did, that was from the movies because it spread the characters to a wider audience beyond the kids and teens, comic fans, who watched the cartoons.

It may be hard to believe now , but when the film came out, the characters were consider pretty much unknown to a large part of the audience in 1999 and 2000, and certainly unknown to the critics at that time.

I was 21 at the time, and I can tell you, most of your non fanboy going film audience didn't really know who the X men were before the first film came out.

It was the films that made Wolverine a pop culture icon, and that went beyond gen X kids like myself who alreadyy knew the cartoon and comics already when the film was released.

Spiderman was of course ,always a star so it was no surprise when the first film was a hit. It was considered a surprise when the first X Men film did well.

So the first two films were pretty important in truly getting the characters noticed beyond the cartoons.

 

[Frodo]

Yes the Raimi films overshadowed the Singer films but the X-men numbers were nothing to sneeze at. Can you imagine if the Spidey films (which were staggered a year or two after the X-men movies) opened less? We would then be talking about what a disappointment those films were.

X-men opened in 2000 with $54Mil. At that time that was the highest non-sequel opening weekend of all time. In the summer of 2000, X-men was *the* talk of the town. That's a big deal. By X1's release in July, the only other movie that had opened higher was Tom Cruise's Mi:2 two months prior with $57Mil.

Spider-man two years later opened with a then-unheard of over $100Mil in just 3 days. You can say Spidey had the X-men beat all you want but you have to understand no other movie had ever opened *that* high: $114Mil.

Summer 2003 was the year the sequel to X-men faced off against the sequel to The Matrix. Everyone pegged Matrix Reloaded the winner even before either movie had come out. But X2 put up a fight opening with $86Mil vs. The Matrix Reloaded's $91Mil. But fans of the X-men heralded their movie's victory because X2 had a higher Rottentomatoes score and was generally more-liked than Reloaded (which has been described as "bad," "clunky" and "a disappointment"). The Matrix' success in 1999 all but guaranteed its sequel would be the most anticipated. X2 went toe-to-toe with Neo's Reloaded. Again, that's a big deal.

The X-men movies were a big deal in the 2000's.

Yeah. I can see how if one is looking back at the whole history of the X Men franchise and comparing it to other big franchises , it can be tempting to dismiss the X Men series in the early 00s.

If you weren't around or aware enough back ,then it can be easy to think these films were insignificant in the context of what we have today.

However, if you were around back then, and you know the context in which the first films came out , you know how they were well liked and popular at the time.

They were also considered new and different from what superhero films had been up to that point.

At the same time, I think the legacy of the later films and the weaker ones have tainted the franchise to a point that its easy to forget the impact that those first films had.

Fans tend to remember X Men Origins Wolverine, X3, and X Men Dark Phoenix and tend to forget X Men and X2.