When “X-Men” debuted on July 14, 2000, superhero movies were at their lowest ebb in years. Even though breakthroughs in visual effects made it increasingly possible to bring fantastical superpowers to life, the vapid camp excesses of 1997’s “Batman & Robin” had curdled the whole idea of costumed heroes saving the day into something that felt more than a little silly.

Twenty years later, the “X-Men” movie franchise is coming to a close with its 13th entry, “The New Mutants,” in a vastly different landscape, with the superhero movie the dominant force at the box office for nearly a decade. And yet despite helping to launch the genre to its current cultural primacy, the “X-Men” movies themselves never quite led that charge, reliably successful but not (until more recently) breakout global sensations.

Unlike the cohesive Marvel Cinematic Universe, the “X-Men” movies are impossibly convoluted, filled with time-travel reboots, narrative contradictions, and outright nonsense. They’re also unfortunately freighted now by their association with Bryan Singer, the disgraced filmmaker who directed the first, second, seventh, and ninth films in the franchise.

But when these movies are good, they are great fun, capturing the zippy energy of the comic books as their mutant human characters explore and exert a seemingly limitless set of superpowers, from controlling the weather to manipulating metal to healing their bodies even after being ripped apart. And when they’re at their very best, these movies have also expanded the boundaries of what is possible with a studio superhero film.

Now that the studio that made and released the “X-Men” films, 20th Century Fox, is a subsidiary of the Disney Entertainment Complex, at some point in this new decade, the X-Men characters will almost certainly begin to show up within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, rebooted and refreshed for a new generation of audiences. Before that happens, however, let’s look back at the best, and worst, of what this franchise had to offer.

  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

    Making an “X-Men” spin-off movie focusing on Hugh Jackman’s wildly popular character certainly isn’t a bad idea — as the rest of this ranking will make clear. But like its title, this movie — directed with airless self-seriousness by Gavin Hood (“Rendition”) — is at once oafishly complicated and painfully dull. It botches the introduction of Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson (a.k.a. Deadpool) so badly that Reynolds mercilessly skewered the film in his two “Deadpool” spin-offs. The visual effects, like the crucial moment when Wolverine sees his adamantium claws for the first time, too often look like they came from a mid-’90s CD-ROM game. And worst of all, as a prequel, “Origins: Wolverine” neglects to explore anything all that new or compelling about its title character, especially since the movie ends with him forgetting everything we’d just seen. The lucky jerk.

  • X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

    This collision of two of the most potent storylines from the X-Men comics — the emergence of Jean Grey as the Dark Phoenix and the upheaval caused by a cure for mutation — should never have resulted in a movie this aggressively stupid. And yet here we are, living in a world in which Brett Ratner directed a movie with the immortal line “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!” Rarely has an actor looked more stranded than Famke Janssen does during Jean’s periodic Dark Phoenix fugues, when she stands blank-faced and black-eyed as undifferentiated CGI chaos swirls around her. There are so many terrible choices in this movie — including unceremoniously killing off Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and robbing Magneto (Ian McKellan) of his mutant powers — that it’s no wonder that just about all the “X-Men” movies that came after it tried to pretend like “The Last Stand” didn’t happen at all.

  • X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

    There are some who appreciate “Apocalypse” for its junky camp excesses, typified by Oscar Isaac’s titular, ancient, all-powerful villain watching a TV for the first time while hiss-moaning the word “Learrrrrnnninggg.” And, sure, that’s cute as far as it goes. But the movie is far more exemplified by the garish, ghoulish sequence in which Michael Fassbender’s Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, is goaded by Apocalypse to use his powers to demolish Auschwitz. As the shapeshifting Raven (née Mystique), Jennifer Lawrence mostly stands around in contractually obligated blue makeup without much to do, while ungodly amounts of expensive CGI are deployed to depict Apocalypse’s decimation of the planet with all the dramatic weight and emotional maturity of a kid demolishing his Legos.

  • Dark Phoenix (2019)

    Simon Kinberg, one of the co-writers of “The Last Stand” who produced and/or wrote several more “X-Men” movies, made his feature directorial debut with what amounts to a do-over of the “Dark Phoenix Saga.” And some of it is appreciably better: Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey is far more affecting, evincing the character’s rage and hurt at discovering the profound childhood trauma that James McAvoy’s Charles Xavier had walled off within her mind. As a director, however, Kinberg’s anonymous competence ultimately makes for a tepid experience. The film’s shapeshifting alien villains, led by Jessica Chastain in power stilettos and bad pale-blonde wig, are particularly flavorless. (Seriously, how do you cast Jessica Chastain as the villain and then make her boring?) As a superhero movie, “Dark Phoenix” is a forgettable shrug. As the swan song for the X-Men, it’s a whimper.

  • X-Men (2000)

    None of these other movies would exist if this one didn’t work, and watching it 20 years later, many of the original “X-Men” movie’s pleasures remain manifest: McKellan is delicious fun as Magneto, Jackman is an instant star as Wolverine, and the themes of persecuted minorities caught in an perpetual fight over whether to appease their oppressors or annihilate them feels more relevant than ever. Still, in light of all that’s come after it, this film feels awfully basic, from the bulky leather uniforms to the chintzy CGI to the overload of exposition — though the latter is mostly delivered by Stewart’s cerebral Prof. X, which helps. We could dwell on Storm’s immortal line about what happens when a toad is hit by lighting, but Halle Berry’s suffered enough.

  • Deadpool (2016)

    This hard-R rated, wildly profane, deliriously violent meta-satire was the blast of hot, irreverent air the “X-Men” franchise, and superhero movies in general, desperately needed. Rarely has an actor felt more at home in a role than Reynolds does as Wade Wilson, a.k.a. Deadpool, and the joy he brings to pissing all over the conventions of superhero cinema is infectious. Made for a fraction of what movies like this usually cost, “Deadpool’s” success permanently expanded the possibilities for the genre, proving you could color way outside the lines and still be a massive hit. Whenever “Deadpool” stops being funny, though, it falls back into a grim nihilism that isn’t as daring or interesting as its makers think it is.

  • The Wolverine (2013)

    The first two acts are near perfect, pulling Jackman’s Wolverine from his familiar surroundings (to him and to us) and plopping him inside a Japanese sci-fi crime thriller, with bullet trains, Yakuza goons, and sword-wielding ninjas. It all shouldn’t feel as radical as it does, but the stranger in a strange land conceit works wonders on illuminating how alienated Wolverine feels from himself. Director James Mangold brings a mature sensibility to the superhero genre, stripping away the franchise’s more fantastical elements to better mine the bottomless wells of regret and self-loathing that plague his hero. Which makes the third act’s pivot to a standard superhero face-off steeped in unconvincing CGI such a letdown, but it turns out that Mangold and Jackman were just getting warmed up.

  • Deadpool 2 (2018)

    It’s bigger, crasser, and in at least one way even more problematic, when Deadpool’s fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is killed off at the start of the movie just so Deadpool could have Deep Feelings. But what ultimately makes “Deadpool 2” better than the first is it has more laughs and more heart. The humor upgrade is largely thanks to the X-Force team of mutants recruited by Deadpool, a goofy twist on superhero team-ups that ends with one of the best jokes ever in a superhero movie. The heart is largely thanks to Julian Dennison (“Hunt for the Wilderpeople”) as Russell (a.k.a. Firefist), a young mutant whose mistreatment at an orphanage drives him towards villainy. Josh Brolin’s time-traveling soldier Cable feels a bit under-utilized, like they were saving his best material for the next film. But even in a movie as entertaining as this one, all that winking, self-aware humor can feel like a diminishing return. If Deadpool does survive into the MCU, less could be more.

  • X2 (2003)

    At the time it opened, “X2” was a revelation, a quantum leap forward in both superhero filmmaking and storytelling from the very first sequence: The teleporting Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) bamf-ing his way into the White House in an attempt to assassinate the president. There are so many goosebump-y moments like that in “X2,” like Magneto pulling the iron out a prison guard’s blood to escape his plastic prison, or Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) coming out to his parents as a mutant. With even more characters to contend with as Prof. X and Magneto’s factions unite to stop Col. William Stryker (Brian Cox) from killing all mutants everywhere, “X2” starts to lumber by the end. But, really, this is the “X-Men” movie that announced that superhero cinema was here to stay.

  • X-Men: First Class (2011)

    Prequels rarely work as well as this one does for the simple reason that the “X-Men” movies at best treat their internal continuity as a suggestion. So rather than worry about how (or whether) “First Class” links up with the “X-Men” timeline, we can just enjoy the experience of meeting Charles Xavier when he’s a groovy Oxford graduate and Erik Lehnsherr when he’s a lethal Nazi hunter. McAvoy and Fassbender sell their characters’ profound and uneasy friendship from their very first scene, and the rest of the new cast — including Lawrence pre-mega-stardom — are aces, too. There has arguably never been a better “X-Men” villain than Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw, the Nazi scientist who twisted Lehnsherr into Magneto, and it was some kind of genius to cast January Jones as the (intentionally?) stiff Emma Frost. “First Class” is great fizzy fun with one major demerit: Summarily killing off the only black male character, Darwin (Edi Gathegi), who is supposed to be able to adapt to any danger to survive — just not, it seems, unthinking screenplays.

  • X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

    In hindsight, this should have been the last movie about the X-Men: a sprawling, time-traveling saga bringing together the “First Class” cast with the original “X-Men” cast as everyone tries to stave off a future riven by death and destruction. It features one of the all-time best sequences in any superhero movie, Quicksilver (Evan Peters) gleefully racing through a kitchen to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” to stop a cadre of cops from taking out Xavier, Magneto, and Wolverine. Speaking of Magneto, he drops the RFK Memorial Stadium around the White House, the coolest manifestation of his powers since his prison break in “X2.” Peter Dinklage shows up as the driven military scientist Bolivar Trask, whose giant robot sentinels become an existential threat to human and mutant-kind alike. And Lawrence’s Mystique is the film’s center, with an arc that shifts from vengeance to a kind of resigned redemption that involves saving the life of President Richard Nixon. What more could you want from an “X-Men” movie?

  • Logan (2017)

    Jackman’s final outing as Wolverine stands apart from the rest of the franchise in so many ways. Only the second “X-Men” movie to be rated R after “Deadpool,” it is often shockingly violent, exposing just how gruesome superhero action would be if it wasn’t muffled by a bloodless PG-13 rating. Reuniting with Jackson after “The Wolverine,” director James Mangold fashions “Logan” into a kind of modern Western, reframing Wolverine as a scarred anti-hero paralyzed by perpetual cycles of savagery and regret, and seen through the prism of a lawless American west trying to forget its past while pressed against an even scarier future. (It’s not for nothing that Mangold, Scott Frank, and Michael Green earned an Oscar nomination for this film for best adapted screenplay.) For really the first time, Patrick Stewart gets to play Charles Xavier — now a 90-year-old whose encroaching senility has lethal consequences — as a recognizable human rather than a placid cypher. And Dafne Keen (“His Dark Materials”) is ferocious as a young mutant girl placed in Logan’s deeply ambivalent care.

    After this layered and deeply affecting film — which paved the way for “Joker” and HBO’s “Watchmen” to further expand the possibilities for comic book adaptations — there was really no going back for this iteration of the “X-Men” franchise. One can only hope that as these characters inevitably regenerate into the MCU, they’ll take the best of what they did in this franchise with them.

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