Though Fox recently came good on the X-Men with releases like Days of Future Past, Logan and Deadpool, it's fair to say that the journey the team's been on since 2000 hasn't been the rosiest.
Though the studio of course gave us Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, X-2 and even First Class, its tenure as the sole guardian of Marvel's mutants has been a mixed one, to say the least. Quiz any Marvel fan on how they feel about Disney's touted acquisition of Fox, and they're likely to greet you with a sigh of relief - so negative is the perception of Fox's X-Men.
The reasons for the studio having garnered this reputation are myriad but simple: far too many X-Men characters have been wasted in these films.
Whether it be lead heroes and villains being portrayed in a totally uncharacteristic manner, leads being given minimal screen-time or just having all their potential wasted in some way, far too many of Marvel's most famous team have been done poorly on the big-screen. Here are the ones who fared the worst.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
