For much of Marvel’s history, their most best-selling team wasn’t the Avengers or the Defenders, or even the Fantastic Four. It was the X-Men, a group of “mutants” with incredible super powers who are marked as different from the rest of a society that hates and fears them no matter how much they try to use their abilities for the benefit of all mankind. From the late 1970s on, Marvel was not only the House of Ideas, it was the House of X-Men, which continued to evolve and mutant, spinning off endless new teams and series. (X-Force! X-Factor! Excalibur! Generation X! And, to a lesser extent, X-Treme X-Men!)

So when Marvel began selling the movie rights to their heroes in the ’90s, the X-Men were one of the first to get snatched up, by 20th Century Fox. By the time Disney bought Fox (and thus also bought back the X-Men movie rights, having acquired Marvel years earlier), the studio had produced 13 films: A trilogy of X-Men films, a trilogy of spinoffs spotlighting Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, a trilogy of prequels about a younger cast of X-Men, a film that combined both the original and prequel casts, two Deadpools, and another spinoff focused on one of Marvel’s own spinoff comics, The New Mutants. 

As a whole, these movies gave comic fans plenty to like, including several elements that were later carried over into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Jackman’s Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool. It wasn’t always a stroll down Graymalkin Lane, though. Some of those aforementioned films went about as well as Wolverine’s attempt to stop Magneto in X-Men #25. (If you haven’t read it, it looked like this.)

With the Fox X-Men franchise now a thing of days of future past, let’s take a look at a few of the series’ most notorious moments.

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