Welcome to The Road to X-Men: Apocalypse, a Collider Heroes Special hosted by Jon Schnepp; with our special panel featuring Amy Dallen and Robert Meyer Burnett!


X-Men: Apocalypse opens on May 27th so we thought we’d go through the feature films that have brought us up to this point. Let’s get into the Way Back Machine and exit in the year 2000. July 14th brought us the very first film simply titled X-men.

X2: X-Men United came out in May 2, 2003 and this time we had a bigger world to play in, after the success of the first film. Bryan Singer returned with a sure hand in directing this second film, expanding the storylines of Wolverine and his brutal origin at the hands of Stryker.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

May 26, 2006 saw the release of X-Men: The Last Stand but this time, Bryan Singer took off direct Superman Returns. The Last Stand recruited director Brett Ratner, shooting from a script by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. This third installment had a cure for the Mutant Gene as the central story, with a division and battle once more between Professor X and Magneto as they fight to stop the cure from wiping them out.

May 1st, 2009 saw the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the first solo film for Hugh Jackman, featuring the century spanning life of Logan and his brother Sabretooth a.k.a. Victor Creed played by Liev Schriber. We see Logan working with Team X (with Wade Wilson) in his early career with Stryker. He then leaves return to his old life until Victor shows up to ruin it all. We then got lots of strange inconsistent scenes with Gambit, Blob, and a Deadpool with his mouth sewn shut. WTF?


May 25th, 2011 was the release date for the re-imagining, somewhat, of X-Men: First Class. This reboot/prequel to the first three X-Men films really helped re-establish the X-Men brand, by throwing them back into the sixties, and recasting the main duo of Professor X and Magneto with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, with Mystique played by Jennifer Lawrence.

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The Wolverine came out on July 26th, 2013, and followed Logan to Japan as he tries to escape from his tormented nightmares involving the ghost of Jean Grey. Wolverine accepts the offer from a man he saved during WW2, which can now give Logan what he desires: death by the destruction of his healing gene. Things don’t go as planed and ends up with Wolverine not fighting a group of Ninjas, and eventually battling the Silver Samurai.

X-Men: Days of Future Past opened May 23rd, 2014 and was a return to greatness, with Bryan Singer making an epic that combined his original cast with the new First Class cast. The main cast travels back and forth from the horrible future to the 1970s in an effort to save all of mutant-kind. This movie had it all, both sets of X-Men, time travel and the ability to fix giant mistakes that happened in the previous movies, as well as getting the Sentinels properly in the X-universe.

That does it for an amazing look at all the X-Men movies leading up to the newest X-adventure: X-Men: Apocalypse. The movie will be released in theatres on May 27th. Stay sweaty!

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Image via 20th Century Fox