X2.

A BIGGER BUDGET AND A FREER HAND

WHAT SINGER DID WITH THE MONEY X-MEN’S SUCCESS BOUGHT HIM

X-Men’s run to nearly $300 million worldwide against a $75 million budget gave Fox a reason to spend more the second time, and to give Bryan Singer more room to make the film he wanted. X2 went into production on a reported $110 million budget, roughly $35 million more than the original, and Singer put the increase into a larger ensemble, more new mutants and a scale of set piece the first film’s budget could never have carried, starting with an opening assault on the White House.

The script took its own roundabout route to the screen. David Hayter and Zak Penn each wrote separate drafts before Fox brought in Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, two writers only a few years out of film school, to rewrite the material into the version that reached cameras. Dougherty later described how closely Singer stayed involved in that process: “We turned in hundreds of drafts just to Bryan. He’s so involved in the story and the development of the screenplay that we were giving him a new script with a couple of drafts every week.”

What they built loosely adapted Chris Claremont’s 1982 graphic novel X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, swapping the comic’s crusading televangelist for a black-ops army colonel named William Stryker, a change that traded the book’s religious argument for a more generic national-security one. Critics treated the finished film as a rarity for the genre at the time: Rotten Tomatoes’ collected critics’ consensus calls it “bigger and better than its predecessor, and a benchmark for comic sequels in general,” at a point when almost no comic-book franchise had managed that with its second instalment.

A NEW MUTANT AT THE WHITE HOUSE

THE ATTACK THAT OPENS THE FILM, AND THE ACTOR UNDER THE MAKEUP

X2 opens before its own title card, with a blue, tattooed, teleporting mutant named Nightcrawler fighting through Secret Service agents toward the Oval Office. The character hadn’t appeared in the first film at all, cut from X-Men on budget grounds along with Beast, so the sequel introduces him by handing him the entire cold open on his own, well before the rest of the ensemble reappears.

Alan Cumming got the role knowing nothing about the character or the franchise beforehand. “I had never heard of the X-Men before I met Bryan to talk about doing this movie,” he has said. “I certainly had no idea who Nightcrawler was.” The performance came at a physical cost the finished eight minutes on screen don’t show: Cumming has described spending “over four hours a day having two men poke my face,” fitted with “harnesses for the tail and for flying, the feet, the hands, which made going to the loo a group effort, the teeth, the lenses.”

It was enough that he didn’t play the role again for more than two decades, until reprising Nightcrawler in Avengers: Doomsday, confirmed to have wrapped filming in 2025.

A SCENE BUILT AS ALLEGORY

THE “COMING OUT” SCENE SINGER HAS CALLED DELIBERATE

Midway through X2, Bobby Drake, Iceman, tells his parents he is a mutant, in a scene staged almost beat for beat like a coming-out conversation: his mother’s first question is whether he has tried not being a mutant. Singer, who has spoken publicly about being gay, has confirmed the parallel was intentional rather than something critics read into the film afterward.

“That scene where he talks to his parents was blatant and meant for humor.”

Bryan Singer

Singer has traced the connection back further than that single scene, describing a lunch conversation with Stan Lee where he asked directly whether the gay allegory had ever entered the comic writers’ minds. Lee’s answer, by Singer’s account, was “Absolutely.” Singer’s own explanation for why the metaphor works, in his telling, is specific to mutants: a person is usually born into a family they identify with, while a mutant, like an LGBT person, can be born into a family that doesn’t share who they are, producing what he has called “a unique kind of aloneness.”

A ROLE FOX HAD TO BE TALKED INTO

HOW BRIAN COX BECAME WILLIAM STRYKER

Fox wasn’t immediately sold on Brian Cox, a respected stage and screen actor without a blockbuster track record, for the film’s central villain. Singer has said he had to negotiate the studio into it directly, using two of Cox’s earlier performances, as a Hannibal Lecter figure in Michael Mann’s Manhunter and as a predator in the independent drama L.I.E., to make the case for him over the names Fox wanted instead.

“Bryan summoned me to Vancouver where they were filming and said, ‘Look, I want you to be in this, but I have to play the waiting game with Fox, because they want me to employ this guy or that guy.’ I trusted him, and finally he got his way.”

Brian Cox, on being cast as William Stryker

Cox has said he will always be grateful to Singer for that, since it was Singer’s own confidence in him that got him the role. The performance that resulted reads, by design, less like a cartoon villain than like Wolverine’s own dark mirror: a soldier convinced his mutant-hunting programme is a rescue mission rather than the extermination campaign it resembles in Claremont’s original story.

THE REWATCH

A BIGGER OPENING, A HIGHER SCORE, AND A TEMPLATE FOR EVERY SEQUEL AFTER

X2 opened on 2 May 2003 to $85.6 million from 3,741 theatres, the widest opening weekend release in box-office history at the time, well ahead of the original X-Men’s $54.5 million debut three years earlier. It went on to $214.9 million domestically and $407.7 million worldwide, comfortably ahead of X-Men’s $157.3 million domestic and $296.3 million worldwide totals, on a budget only modestly larger than the first film’s.

Reviews improved by a similar margin. Rotten Tomatoes lists X2 at 85% from critics and 85% from audiences, against the original’s 82% and 83%, and Metacritic’s aggregate climbed from 64 to 68. Barely five years into the modern comic-book boom Blade had helped start, X2 became one of the first sequels in that wave that critics rated above the original rather than as a lesser repeat of it.

The comparison that stuck was with Spider-Man 2 a year later: the two films are still cited together as the moment critics stopped assuming a comic-book sequel would be worse than its predecessor. Its final scene, Jean Grey’s apparent death and the psychic shockwave that follows, also set up the Dark Phoenix material the franchise wouldn’t attempt again on screen for another sixteen years. For a first watch, it’s the middle entry of the original trilogy in the X-Men movies in order guide, and sits between Daredevil and Hulk in the wider Marvel movies in release order guide.