X-MEN.

A DECADE IN DEVELOPMENT

FIVE SCREENWRITERS AND A GREENLIGHT FOX ALMOST TOOK BACK

Various X-Men film treatments had circulated since the 1980s without any reaching a soundstage. 20th Century Fox bought the film rights in 1994 and spent the next two years cycling through unproduced drafts, including one from Andrew Kevin Walker built around Wolverine and Cyclops’s rivalry and a version of Magneto’s backstory tied to Chernobyl, and a treatment Michael Chabon pitched in 1996. Bryan Singer signed to direct that same year, and the script passed through further rewrites from Ed Solomon, Tom DeSanto, Christopher McQuarrie and Joss Whedon before David Hayter wrote the version that reached the screen.

The greenlight itself wasn’t secure until close to the end. McQuarrie was brought in for what was meant to be a three-week rewrite, but by October 1998 he still hadn’t delivered a usable draft, and Fox pulled its approval outright. DeSanto and Singer reworked the script quickly enough that the studio restored the greenlight before Christmas. McQuarrie was later offered a Writers Guild credit anyway, and turned it down since so little of his draft had survived into Hayter’s.

Budget concerns forced Beast and Nightcrawler out of the film that finally got made, characters the franchise wouldn’t properly introduce until years later. Production began in 1999, five years after Fox bought the rights, for a release that landed on 14 July 2000.

THE LEAD ROLE, RECAST MID-SHOOT

HOW HUGH JACKMAN REPLACED WOLVERINE WEEKS INTO FILMING

Dougray Scott was the actor Fox actually cast as Wolverine, with then-studio president Tom Rothman publicly praising his “charisma, physicality and intensity.” Hugh Jackman auditioned for the same part while Scott held it and lost the role, partly for reading wrong on the page: at 6’2” he was taller than the character, and read as too warm and good-looking for someone built around barely controlled anger.

Scott’s Wolverine never made it to set. He was still committed to Mission: Impossible 2, a role Tom Cruise had personally picked him for, and that production ran well past its own schedule through 1999. Scott and the film’s crew have given different explanations for what kept him there since. Speaking in 2020, Scott said: “Tom Cruise didn’t let me do it… For whatever reason he said I couldn’t.” X-Men screenwriter David Hayter has instead pointed to a motorcycle accident during MI-2’s climactic chase, describing Scott afterward as “pretty messed up.”

With cameras already rolling and Fox unable to secure him, producer Lauren Shuler Donner pushed to bring Jackman back in. He was flown out for a crash round of coaching aimed at finding, in Hayter’s words, “that sort of Clint Eastwood, hard-ass edge,” and joined a production that was already weeks into its shoot. The actor rejected for reading too nice went on to play the role for the next 24 years.

BLACK LEATHER OVER YELLOW SPANDEX

WHY THE X-MEN NEVER WORE THEIR COMIC COLOURS ON SCREEN

The production put its mutants in matching black leather rather than the yellow-and-blue uniforms of the comics, arriving three years after Batman & Robin had buried the previous superhero franchise under neon paint and rubber suits. The film addresses its own choice directly: when Wolverine complains early on (“You actually go outside in these things?”), Cyclops answers, “Well, what would you prefer, yellow spandex?”

“It wasn’t to [irritate] them but to say ‘Hey, we hear you. We understand what you want.’”

Ralph Winter, X-Men producer, on the “yellow spandex” line

Whatever the intent, the line stuck. It’s become the film’s most quoted piece of dialogue, and the standard reference point whenever a later X-Men film flirts with, then avoids, comic-accurate costumes.

AN ACCENT OVERRULED IN POST

WHAT HAPPENED TO HALLE BERRY’S STORM AFTER SHE WRAPPED

Halle Berry shot the film with a South African accent for Storm, closer to the character’s comics background. According to X-Men screenwriter David Hayter, that choice didn’t survive post-production: Berry re-recorded nearly all of her dialogue in ADR with an American accent late in the process.

“Because she recorded it afterwards, it doesn’t feel like it matches her in the moment, and so it takes the power out of the line.”

David Hayter, X-Men screenwriter, on Storm’s re-recorded dialogue

The account comes from Hayter rather than from Berry’s own telling of it, and it’s worth being precise about that distinction. But it’s a small, specific illustration of how much of a performance can be reshaped after a set closes, long before an audience ever sees the finished cut.

THE REWATCH

A TIGHT SCHEDULE, A BIG OPENING, AND THE GENRE’S SECOND CHANCE

X-Men reached screens on a $75 million budget, modest for a summer ensemble tentpole even in 2000, and the production felt that pressure throughout. Hayter has described a point during the shoot when it fell a single day behind schedule and Fox’s studio president and a vice president both turned up on set to tell Singer to catch up.

None of that showed at the box office. X-Men opened to $54.5 million from 3,025 theatres, finished its run with $157.3 million domestically and $296.3 million worldwide, and drew an 82% critics’ score against an 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, with Metacritic’s aggregate sitting at 64.

Coming two years after Blade and three years after Batman & Robin had left the genre for dead, X-Men did what Blade alone hadn’t: it proved a full ensemble of comic-book heroes could open as a mainstream, PG-13 tentpole rather than a niche R-rated hit. For a first watch, it’s the earliest stop on the X-Men movies in order guide, and sits near the start of the wider Marvel movies in release order guide alongside Blade.