8 Small-Scale Movies That Blew Up Into Blockbuster Action Franchises

Unlike the comic book movies of the modern era, 2000's X-Men film wasn't created with the idea of it being the first in a long franchise, or using it as a launching off point for an entire superhero universe, complete with spin-offs and prequels. And yet, that's exactly what happened.

Bryan Singer's first, moderately gritty stab at bringing Wolverine and the rest of our favorite mutants to the big screen should be looked at as the unofficial birth of comic book movies as a major commodity.

Of course, at the time it was merely a muted - though faithful - comic book adaptation that looked to rekindle some of the magic of those old Superman movies and Tim Burton's first go-round with the Caped Crusader.

True, this film had a substantially larger budget than most of the other movies on this list - $75 million isn't quite a drop in the bucket - but it should be noted that the next big superhero movie to come out was Spider-Man, which cost nearly twice that.

Still, this first, slightly rougher version of the X-Men can be attributed to Fox's unwillingness to budge on their numbers, rejecting an incredible treatment from Bryan Singer that was estimated to go $5 million over budget.

Most every other movie in the live-action X-Men saga has went into production with hundreds of millions of dollars, and now that we're living in a world where comic book movies are almost a sure thing at the box office, it's unlikely studios will stop throwing money at them any time soon.