Every Single X-Men Movie Ranked From Worst To Best

The X-Men movie franchise as we know it is no more. One huge pile of Disney money later and we're looking at the impending arrival of Marvel's famous school of mutants to the MCU. Somehow.

That obviously poses a lot of problems in terms of continuity and story logic, but anyone even vaguely familiar with the franchise's lax approach to the timeline will know that they've never been all that hot on keeping it all tight and simple. So Marvel Studios already have a low benchmark they can aim to beat at the very least.

Now that the first era of X-Men movies is one step closer to being over thanks to Dark Phoenix, let's look at how the mainline X-Men movies AND the solo spin-offs stack up, including Simon Kinberg's Mutants Space Odyssey...

12. X-Men: Dark Phoenix

Wew boy, that's really something.

After the almost pantomime levels of doom around the production, it felt too easy to write Dark Phoenix off before anyone had seen it, so it was always best to go into it with an open mind. After all, the Dark Phoenix Saga is a seminal, important comic book arc and it's well worth a great film adaptation.

Sadly, this is not it.

It gets too confused on what it wants to be, loses focus too easily and is horribly written from the over-arching story down to almost every single line uttered by every character. There's so much false melodrama and so many insistent attempts to manipulate you that every good idea - like that of Xavier being "poisoned" by fame or Jean coming to terms with her power or aliens (vague hand-wave) - ends up looking poor.

The execution is awful, even when the effects are great and it's just really, sadly hard to care about any of it.