Tier List
X-Men Movies Tier List: All 14 Films Ranked (2026)
All 14 films in Fox's X-Men saga, from the 2000 original through Logan, the Deadpool trilogy, and Deadpool & Wolverine, ranked from S-tier to D-tier. Then build your own X-Men tier list with head-to-head comparisons.
The Complete X-Men Tier List
The X-Men franchise practically invented the modern superhero movie, and then spent two decades veering from all-time greats to legendary misfires. Across 14 films and multiple timelines, it gave us Logan, the Deadpool trilogy, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, sometimes within a few years of each other. Here's every Fox-era X-Men film ranked into classic S/A/B/C/D tiers. Disagree with where First Class landed? Settle it yourself in minutes with Shortlist.
Logan
(2017)The greatest X-Men film and one of the best superhero movies ever made. A bleak, R-rated western that gives Hugh Jackman's Wolverine the elegiac send-off he deserved. Earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
X2: X-Men United
(2003)Bryan Singer's sequel perfected the formula: the Nightcrawler White House opening, Magneto's prison break, and a near-perfect ensemble. The high point of the original era.
X-Men: Days of Future Past
(2014)A time-travel epic that united the original and First Class casts and soft-rebooted the timeline. The Quicksilver kitchen sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
Deadpool
(2016)The R-rated, fourth-wall-breaking gamble that became a phenomenon. Ryan Reynolds was born to play Wade Wilson, and its success rewrote the rulebook for comic-book movies.
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Our top 5, head-to-head. Tap the one you prefer and we will build your order, then show you where you disagree with us.
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X-Men: First Class
(2011)A stylish 1960s reboot built on the electric Xavier-Magneto dynamic between James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Re-energized the franchise after Origins.
Deadpool & Wolverine
(2024)The Merc with a Mouth crashes the MCU and drags a reluctant Wolverine along. A loving, cameo-stuffed sendoff to the Fox X-Men era and a box-office juggernaut.
X-Men
(2000)The film that kicked off the modern superhero era. It took comic-book movies seriously and proved an ensemble of mutants could anchor a blockbuster. Hugely influential.
Deadpool 2
(2018)Bigger, funnier, and home to the X-Force gag. Introduces Cable and Domino while keeping the meta humor sharp, even if it lacks the freshness of the original.
The Wolverine
(2013)A grounded, Japan-set character study that course-corrected after Origins. The bullet-train fight is a highlight; the third act is where it stumbles.
X-Men: The Last Stand
(2006)Brett Ratner's entry fumbled the beloved Dark Phoenix Saga and killed off characters carelessly. Some big set pieces, but a disappointing close to the original trilogy.
X-Men: Apocalypse
(2016)A bloated villain movie with a muddy CGI finale. Oscar Isaac is wasted under heavy makeup, though the second Quicksilver sequence is a bright spot.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
(2009)Infamous for botching Deadpool by sewing his mouth shut. A muddled origin story widely considered the franchise low point, until two more challengers arrived.
Dark Phoenix
(2019)A second, equally unsuccessful crack at the Dark Phoenix Saga. A flat, troubled production that limped the Fox era to a close at the box office.
The New Mutants
(2020)A horror-tinged spin-off stuck in release limbo for years. Interesting ideas, but it arrived as an afterthought and landed with little impact.
Your turn
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All 14 X-Men films, one tap each, S down to D. It saves as you go and it prints. No email, no signup.
Open your X-Men tier sheetEvery X-Men Movie by Box Office, Budget and Return
The 14 X-Men films have grossed $7.425B worldwide against $1.985B in production budgets, and the three Deadpool films account for 39.1% of that money on 18.5% of the spend. Deadpool & Wolverine is the only film in the franchise to pass a billion dollars. The New Mutants is the only one that did not earn its budget back in cinemas.
Below is the same 14 films as the tier list above, re-sorted by worldwide gross, with the budget and the return multiple beside it. The last column is the one almost nobody publishes for this franchise, and it is the one that actually explains what happened to it: gross on its own rewards whatever cost the most to make.
| Film | Worldwide | Budget | Return | Tier | TMDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deadpool & Wolverine2024 | $1.338B | $200.0M | 6.69x | A | 7.6 |
| Deadpool 22018 | $785.9M | $110.0M | 7.14x | B | 7.5 |
| Deadpool2016 | $782.8M | $58.0M | 13.50x | S | 7.6 |
| X-Men: Days of Future Past2014 | $748.0M | $250.0M | 2.99x | S | 7.5 |
| Logan2017 | $619.0M | $97.0M | 6.38x | S | 7.8 |
| X-Men: Apocalypse2016 | $543.9M | $178.0M | 3.06x | C | 6.5 |
| X-Men: The Last Stand2006 | $459.4M | $210.0M | 2.19x | C | 6.4 |
| The Wolverine2013 | $415.4M | $120.0M | 3.46x | B | 6.4 |
| X2: X-Men United2003 | $407.7M | $110.0M | 3.71x | S | 7 |
| X-Men Origins: Wolverine2009 | $373.1M | $150.0M | 2.49x | D | 6.3 |
| X-Men: First Class2011 | $353.6M | $160.0M | 2.21x | A | 7.3 |
| X-Men2000 | $296.3M | $75.0M | 3.95x | A | 7 |
| Dark Phoenix2019 | $252.4M | $200.0M | 1.26x | D | 6 |
| The New Mutants2020 | $49.2M | $67.0M | 0.73x | D | 6.1 |
Worldwide grosses, production budgets, runtimes and user scores read from the TMDB API on 2026-08-27. Return is worldwide gross divided by production budget, computed from the two columns beside it. It is a rough measure on purpose: it counts no marketing spend and no share to exhibitors, so a film needs roughly 2.5x before it is genuinely profitable. The $7.425B total is the sum of the 14 rows above.
Money and quality come apart badly in this franchise, in both directions. Our four S tier picks land 3rd, 4th, 5th and 9th on the money list. The sixth biggest earner, X-Men: Apocalypse, is in C tier. And the film we put at the very top, Logan, made $619.0M on a $97.0M budget while X-Men: Days of Future Past spent $250.0M, the largest budget in the franchise, to make about 1.2 times as much.
The return column is where the Fox era's whole story sits. The four best returns belong to Deadpool (13.50x on $58.0M, the smallest budget of the modern era), Deadpool 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Logan: in other words, the R-rated films nobody greenlit as a tentpole. The two worst belong to Dark Phoenix (1.26x on $200.0M) and The New Mutants (0.73x), the two films that closed the era out. A franchise that made $7.425B ended because the expensive half stopped working, not because the whole of it did.
The Three X-Men Timelines, and Why Days of Future Past Reset Them
The X-Men films are not one continuity. They are three, and a 2014 time travel plot deliberately deleted one of them. This is the single reason the watch order question is harder here than in any other superhero franchise, and it is worth two minutes before you rank anything.
1. The original timeline (2000 to 2006, plus the Wolverine solo films). X-Men, X2 and X-Men: The Last Stand, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine hanging off it. This is the continuity where the Dark Phoenix Saga was first attempted, and fumbled.
2. The prequel timeline (2011 onward). X-Men: First Class went back to 1962 and recast Xavier and Magneto with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. For three years it read as a straightforward prequel to the films above.
3. The rewritten timeline (2014 onward). X-Men: Days of Future Past sent Wolverine's consciousness back to 1973 to stop an assassination, and by succeeding it erased the events of The Last Stand from the record. The film says so out loud in its final scene, which shows characters killed in the earlier films alive at the school. Everything after it, Apocalypse (1983) and Dark Phoenix (1992), happens in that rewritten version, which is why the franchise gets a second and equally unsuccessful run at the Dark Phoenix Saga: in this timeline the first one never happened.
The Deadpool films sit deliberately outside all of this and make jokes about it, and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) resolves the question by absorbing the whole Fox era into the Marvel Cinematic Universe multiverse as a closed branch. That is the tidiest ending this timeline was ever going to get.
For ranking purposes, none of this needs resolving. The tier list above treats all 14 as one body of work, because the question "is Logan better than X2" does not depend on which continuity either one belongs to.
How to Build Your Own X-Men Tier List
The card above builds one, sorting five from your taps, which covers the calls nobody fights about: Logan and X2 high, Origins and Dark Phoenix low.
The huge, messy middle is where the real debates live, and it starts below the five the card sorts. Where does Deadpool & Wolverine land against the films it spends two hours making fun of? Is The Wolverine better than its reputation? Does Apocalypse outrank The Last Stand? Shortlist ranks all 14 the same head-to-head way, across two decades and several timelines, and gives you a share link at the end.
Read more about the comparison-based approach in our movie tier list guide.
Two different things get scored around this page. The S to D tiers above are editorial, and S means a film that held up rather than one that reviewed well on opening weekend. The score you see in the app is a different number: it is built from the head-to-head comparisons you make, scaled to 0 to 10, not from critic averages. How Shortlist scores work sets out the whole method.
This website uses TMDB and the TMDB APIs but is not endorsed, certified, or otherwise approved by TMDB.
How Long Does It Take to Watch Every X-Men Movie?
Watching all 14 X-Men films back to back takes 28h 3m, or 1683 minutes. That is a little over three evenings at four hours a night. The franchise splits into four runs that can be watched independently, and only one of them is long:
| Run | Films | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| The mainline team filmsX-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix | 7 | 14h 23m |
| The Wolverine solo filmsX-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, Logan | 3 | 6h 10m |
| The Deadpool filmsDeadpool, Deadpool 2, Deadpool & Wolverine | 3 | 5h 56m |
| The spin-offThe New Mutants | 1 | 1h 34m |
| Everything | 14 | 28h 3m |
Runtimes are the theatrical cuts as listed by the TMDB API, read 2026-08-27, and the totals are the sum of the rows. Extended and unrated cuts run longer, most notably Deadpool 2, whose Super Duper Cut adds about fifteen minutes.
The shortest honest route into the franchise is the Wolverine run at 6h 10m, and it ends on Logan, the film at the top of the tier list. The longest is the seven mainline team films at 14h 23m, which is also where the timeline problem above lives.
What Order Should You Watch the X-Men Movies In?
Watch the X-Men films in release order. This is one of the rare franchises where that is not the lazy answer but the correct one, because X-Men: Days of Future Past is a film about the earlier films, and it lands differently if you have not seen the ones it rewrites. Release order is also the only order in which the recasting of Xavier and Magneto makes sense as a surprise.
A strict chronological run does not actually exist, which is worth saying plainly because most watch orders published for this franchise quietly pretend otherwise. Ordering by in-story year gives you 1962 (First Class), 1973 (Days of Future Past), 1983 (Apocalypse), 1992 (Dark Phoenix), then the 2000s original trilogy. But Days of Future Past erases The Last Stand from continuity, so that run asks you to watch a film after the film that deleted it. See the three timelines above for why.
If you want the short version: the Wolverine run (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, Logan) is 6h 10m and self-contained. The Deadpool films sit deliberately outside the continuity and can be watched at any point, though Deadpool & Wolverine is much funnier once you have seen the era it is saying goodbye to.
All three orders in full, every film with its exact theatrical runtime, and the point where the timeline splits in two are in our X-Men movies in order guide.
X-Men Tier List FAQ
What is the best X-Men movie?
Logan (2017) is the most common pick, a critically acclaimed, R-rated character drama that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. X2: X-Men United (2003) and Days of Future Past (2014) are the usual runners-up.
How many X-Men movies are there?
The Fox X-Men universe includes 14 films: the original trilogy, the three Wolverine solo films, the four First Class-era prequels, The New Mutants, and the three Deadpool movies (counting Deadpool & Wolverine, which carried the saga into the MCU).
Are the Deadpool movies part of the X-Men franchise?
Yes, the Deadpool films were produced under Fox's X-Men license and feature mutants like Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Cable. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) explicitly closes out the Fox era while folding the characters into Marvel Studios' MCU.
What is the worst X-Men movie?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and Dark Phoenix (2019) are the usual picks for the bottom, with The New Mutants (2020) close behind. Origins is especially infamous for its botched version of Deadpool. It's exactly the kind of debate a head-to-head ranking is built to settle.
What is the highest grossing X-Men movie?
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) at $1.338B worldwide, the only film in the franchise to pass a billion dollars. The 14 X-Men films have taken $7.425B between them, and the three Deadpool films account for 39.1% of that on 18.5% of the combined budget.
How long does it take to watch all the X-Men movies?
All 14 theatrical cuts run 28h 3m back to back. The franchise splits into four runs you can watch on their own: the seven mainline team films (14h 23m), the three Wolverine solo films (6h 10m), the three Deadpool films (5h 56m) and The New Mutants (1h 34m).
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