X-MEN:
THE LAST STAND.

THREE DIRECTORS IN UNDER A YEAR

HOW A RUSH HOUR DIRECTOR ENDED UP WITH EIGHT WEEKS TO PREP A TRILOGY’S ENDING

Bryan Singer left the X-Men franchise in July 2004 to direct Superman Returns for Warner Bros. instead, taking X2 screenwriters Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, and star James Marsden, along with him. Singer has said the choice came down to which project he actually had a finished idea for. He had one for Superman. He didn’t yet have one for a third X-Men film.

Fox turned first to Matthew Vaughn, who got far enough into prep to cast Kelsey Grammer as Beast and Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut before dropping out in the closing days of May 2005, reported at the time simply as personal reasons. That left the studio without a director again, with a Memorial Day 2006 release date it had already committed to and cameras due to roll within months.

Fox hired Brett Ratner on 5 June 2005, a director known up to that point for the Rush Hour comedies rather than for effects-driven spectacle, and sent him toward an August start in Vancouver. Ratner has been plain about how little runway that actually left him.

“I only had 8 weeks prep. I’m a decisive director. If it would have been the first X-Men, the first Harry Potter, it would have been a whole different story.”

Brett Ratner

A SCRIPT WRITTEN JUST TO GET A SIGNATURE

WHY MATTHEW VAUGHN ACTUALLY WALKED AWAY

At the time, Vaughn’s exit read as a straightforward scheduling story: a director worried a compressed timeline wouldn’t let him make the film he wanted. That account wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t the whole story.

In a 2023 interview, Vaughn filled in the rest. Halle Berry had told Fox she would only return as Storm if the character finally got a real role, and wouldn’t sign until she had pages that delivered on it. According to Vaughn, executives handed him a script opening on the word “Africa” and told him plainly it was “Halle Berry’s script,” written to be exactly what she wanted to see, with the intention of throwing it out the moment she signed. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re gonna do that to an Oscar-winning actress who plays Storm? I’m outta here.’ So, I quit at that point,” Vaughn said. Berry later thanked him publicly for going on the record about it, calling the plan “shady shit” in her own response.

He returned to the franchise anyway, six years later, directing its 1960s-set prequel reboot, X-Men: First Class.

TWO CLASSIC ARCS, ONE FILM

WHY DARK PHOENIX AND THE MUTANT CURE STORY NEVER GOT ROOM TO BREATHE

Screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn built the finished script around two separate comic arcs at once: Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Dark Phoenix Saga, in which Jean Grey’s psychic power turns her into a near-godlike threat, and the more recent Gifted storyline, built around a biotech “cure” that strips mutants of their powers permanently. Folded into a single film running 104 minutes, the shortest runtime in the trilogy alongside the original X-Men, neither story got the room a full film had already given Wolverine’s memory or Magneto’s manhunt in the first two entries.

“My biggest regret from The Last Stand is that the Dark Phoenix story, which is the most enduring story in the history of this very esteemed saga, was given a back seat in the movie.”

Simon Kinberg, co-writer of X-Men: The Last Stand

The cure plot carries most of the film’s actual mechanics: Magneto’s war footing, Mystique and Rogue’s opposite reactions to a shot that would end their powers, and a government mutant-registration debate. Phoenix functions closer to a subplot inside that story than the reverse, the exact complaint Kinberg got a second chance to fix thirteen years later with Dark Phoenix (2019), a film with its own separate set of problems.

THE CULL

CYCLOPS, PROFESSOR X, MYSTIQUE, AND HOW FAST THEY WENT

Cyclops died off-screen, early, and almost wordlessly. Jean Grey’s newly surfaced Phoenix persona kills him near the start of the film, and Wolverine finds nothing left of him but a pair of floating glasses. Some of that came down to scheduling rather than choice: James Marsden’s overlapping commitment to Superman Returns left him only a short window on set for this film, shaping how little material a founding member of the team got before his death.

Professor X goes next, seemingly disintegrated by Phoenix mid-film, a death resolved only in a post-credits scene revealing that his consciousness survived inside another body. Mystique loses her powers entirely not long after, hit by a cure dart meant for Magneto, who abandons her the moment she can no longer shapeshift. Rebecca Romijn described the arc plainly at the time: “Mystique goes through a dramatic time and suffers a heartbreak… she goes through a traumatic experience.”

“I know X-Men 3 was quite rushed and I didn’t complete it, and I felt a little like it was probably my responsibility to do that as a filmmaker, and I didn’t… I might not have killed all those characters.”

Bryan Singer

Marsden’s own retrospective read is calmer than the fan reaction the film received. “I appreciate all the fans that have said that he didn’t get his due, or whatever,” he said in 2011. “But for me it’s very difficult to look back on that experience with any sort of disappointment or regret.” One performance came through the cull with its reputation intact: Kelsey Grammer’s Beast, cast under Vaughn and kept on by Ratner, is the one piece of the film that critics and fans still agree worked.

THE REWATCH

A RECORD OPENING, A SCORE WELL BELOW X2, AND THE ROAD TO A REBOOT

On a reported $210 million budget, the film opened on 26 May 2006 to $102.8 million from 3,690 theatres, the biggest opening ever for a film released over Memorial Day weekend, ahead of the $90.2 million The Lost World: Jurassic Park had set in 1997. It went on to $234.4 million domestically and $460.4 million worldwide, the highest total of the original trilogy.

Reviews didn’t follow the box office. Rotten Tomatoes lists X-Men: The Last Stand at 56% from critics against a 61% audience score, with a consensus that calls it a film that “provides plenty of mutant action for fans of the franchise, even if it does so at the expense of its predecessors’ deeper character moments.” Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 58. Both mark a real step down from X2’s 85% critics’ score and Metacritic aggregate of 68, the sharpest drop from one entry to the next in the trilogy’s run.

The film marks the point the original trilogy’s critical reputation turned, and Fox didn’t continue the story from where it left off. Five years later, the studio reset the series entirely with a 1960s-set prequel, X-Men: First Class, directed by the same Matthew Vaughn who had walked away from this production. That reset erased Kelsey Grammer’s Beast along with the timeline he belonged to. “Beast is a passion for me,” Grammer has said. “I’ve always wanted to be a blue person and now I am in film.” Told the next film would go back in time with a younger actor in the role, he recalled the moment plainly: “I slowly deduced that I was not included.” For a first watch, this closes the original trilogy in the X-Men movies in order guide, and sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after X2.