X-MEN:
FIRST CLASS.

A YEAR FROM GREENLIGHT TO RELEASE, NOT A DAY MORE

WHY MATTHEW VAUGHN HAD ‘NO TIME TO THINK’ ON THIS ONE

Fox signed Matthew Vaughn to direct and set the 3 June 2011 release date in May 2010, with cameras not rolling until that September, an unusually tight runway for an effects-heavy franchise film. Vaughn, fresh off Kick-Ass, has described the schedule bluntly: “It’s the first time I’ve made a movie where I’ve had no time to think.” He’d approved the final cut only five days before one interview, after just nine weeks of post-production, and didn’t pretend he wouldn’t have used more: asked if he’d wanted extra time, he said, “Fuck, yeah!”

Co-star January Jones corroborated the crunch independently, noting the production had to push its wrap date without Fox moving the release date to match: “I think it was unrealistic for them to think they were going to make such a huge movie in whatever we had, two months or something,” she said, adding of Vaughn: “I have a lot of faith in Matthew as a director and an editor; I think his movies are great.”

A COLD WAR THRILLER FIRST, A SUPERHERO FILM SECOND

THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, AND VAUGHN’S OWN BOND MOVIE BY ANOTHER NAME

Co-writer Bryan Singer proposed folding the real Cuban Missile Crisis into the mutants’ origin story; Vaughn has said he wasn’t familiar with the actual history going in and came away startled by it: “I cannot believe that happened.” The stylistic direction was entirely his own, built around genres he’d wanted to make for years rather than a conventional superhero template: “I always wanted to do a Cold War movie, and I’ve been desperate to do a Bond film, always have been. And here I got my cake and ate it.”

That approach shaped Sebastian Shaw directly. Rather than a comic-book heavy, Vaughn pushed for a classic Bond antagonist, reportedly pointing to You Only Live Twice as a touchstone: “suave, debonair, charming” rather than campy. Kevin Bacon, who played Shaw, built the character as a self-made Hellfire Club tycoon rather than a copy of his comics look: “My look is very different from the guy in the comic books. We decided pretty early on that that was not going to translate to film.”

A FRIENDSHIP BUILT TO BREAK

MCAVOY AND FASSBENDER, AND THE IDEOLOGICAL SPLIT THE FILM IS BUILT AROUND

James McAvoy was cast as Charles Xavier first, with Michael Fassbender brought in to test opposite him; the two had worked together a decade earlier on the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, and both have credited that history for how quickly their chemistry came together on set. McAvoy has described Xavier’s attraction to Erik Lehnsherr in pointed, slightly unflattering terms: “Charles is always looking for somebody who’s damaged,” he said, reading it as feeding “his messiah complex or his god complex” as much as genuine friendship.

“Erik’s so uncompromising, you’re drawn to him… Humanity is going to stab us in the back, he says. And they do.”

James McAvoy, on why Magneto’s worldview proves harder to dismiss than Xavier’s own

Fassbender has framed the two men’s split as a disagreement over method rather than goal: “both of these characters want a better future for their people, they just have very different ideologies about how to get that,” pitting Xavier’s integration against Erik’s belief in mutants protecting themselves by force if needed. Jennifer Lawrence, cast as young Mystique shortly after her Oscar-nominated breakout in Winter’s Bone and before The Hunger Games made her a household name, anchored the film’s third major perspective on that same argument, caught between the two men’s competing visions for her.

A DIRECTOR WHO’D WALKED AWAY, RETURNING TO FIX WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND

THE SAME VAUGHN WHO QUIT THE LAST STAND, NOW RESETTING ITS TIMELINE

Vaughn had walked off X-Men: The Last Stand in 2006 after Fox handed him a script written specifically to secure Halle Berry’s signature, with executives privately intending to rewrite it once she’d committed; he quit rather than go along with it, and Tom Rothman reportedly told him afterward he’d never work in the town again. Five years later, Fox brought him back to direct First Class, a 1960s-set prequel that quietly reset the series rather than continuing from where The Last Stand left off, recasting younger versions of Xavier, Magneto and Beast in the process.

The soft reboot wasn’t without seams: First Class’s 1962 setting left Xavier already paralyzed and its characters’ ages harder to square with the original trilogy’s own timeline, discrepancies the franchise didn’t directly address until 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past used time travel to split off a new continuity rather than reconcile the old one point by point. None of that cost the film at release. It landed as the clear, critically acclaimed course-correction after X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with Deadline’s own box-office framing capturing the split verdict directly in its headline: “Risky Reboot? X-Men: First Class $56M; Lowest Marvel Opening In A Long Time.”

THE REWATCH

A SMALLER OPENING THAN WOLVERINE’S, A FAR BETTER RECEPTION

X-Men: First Class opened to $55.1 million domestically, actually lower than X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s $85.1 million two years earlier, and finished with $146.4 million in the US and $352.6 million worldwide. Reviews told a completely different story: Rotten Tomatoes lists an 86% critics’ score against Wolverine’s 37%, with an official consensus calling it “a welcome return to form for the franchise,” crediting its “strong script, stylish direction, and powerful performances from its well-rounded cast.” Metacritic’s 65 reinforced the same verdict against Wolverine’s 40.

That reception reset Fox’s X-Men plans around this cast and period, leading directly to Days of Future Past, Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix as a connected prequel line. For a first watch, X-Men: First Class sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after Thor, and opens the X-Men movies in order guide’s prequel era, unconnected to the original trilogy’s own continuity.