Disney almost killed the X-Men. Yeah, despite being one of the most iconic superhero franchises in the world, Disney did almost everything in their power to stomp out the mutants once and for all. For a while, they became the worst X-Men villains. And now, they might be doing something even worse than that. Hello internet, welcome to Film Theory, the show that can read your mind. I'm seeing that you're thinking about subscribing. I bet you can't do it in three seconds. Oh, oh wow, you already did it. Dang, you're fast. So, how about X-Men 97, huh? I don't think I've seen this much love for a Marvel series since Daredevil back in the day, and it's definitely worth the hype. Seriously, this show slaps. If you don't know, the X-Men are one of Marvel's biggest franchises, featuring characters born with mutations that activate in their teenage years, giving them superpowers. They team up based out of a big mansion, going on missions to save the world, and have a whole lot of character drama in between. It's like a soap opera with superpowers. Looks like Magneto and Rogue have the danger room next. Oh, and Ultimaro too. Wow, Rogue's really training her stamina with the new boss. And now, between X-Men 97 and the upcoming Deadpool and Wolverine finally bringing mutants into the MCU, things feel like the good old days where your average Joe is talking about how awesome Logan is or what their favorite mutation is. Speaking of, tell me, what would your mutant power be? Please, let me know down in the comments below. I think mine would be one of those incredibly useless ones, like finding any uneven ground while walking and tripping on it 100% of the time. I already do that in real life. Anyway, while it's great to see the X-Men back in the limelight, as someone who grew up loving their movies and cartoons, it does make you stop and wonder, wait, why did they seem to disappear in the first place? Yeah, in the 90s and aughts, it felt like you couldn't go 10 feet without seeing Hugh Jackman's sideburned face plastered on a T-shirt or poster or whatever. And it wasn't even just the movies. There were X-Men comic books and video games and cartoons and mugs and bags, and you get it. And then, nothing. Outside of the theater, it's like the X-Men just dropped off the face of the planet. Well, loyal theorists, there was a very good reason for that, one that involved the lovably evil Mickey Mouse. Yeah, today I wanna tell you a little story about how Disney tried and almost succeeded in killing the X-Men. And the worst part of it, they flipped the script, and they're literally no better than the villains that the X-Men themselves fight. You heard that right. Disney might be the worst villains that the X-Men have ever faced. So grab your yellow spandex, friends. What'd you expect, black leather? And let's mutate. So before we really dive into this, it's important that we have some context for just how massive the X-Men were in the 90s. Like, it was a perfect storm of cool characters, awesome powers, and character drama that kept people reading. The franchise was consistently in the top five best-selling comic book brands, just under Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, while X-Men number one, published in 1991, is to this day the single best-selling issue of a comic book ever, with 8.2 million copies sold. This massive hit led to multiple spinoff comics throughout the 90s that helped save Marvel from completely imploding, and a Fox animated series that had a viewership of over 23 million. It got to the point where anything with an X in the title was driving Marvel, and even obscure villain-of-the-week characters like Deadpool could become massive stars. Just saying, there was a reason that the modern age of superhero blockbuster movies was kicked off partially by the X-Men. Fox saw how successful their animated series was and wanted a live-action version of that, and ended up with one of the most popular superhero film franchises of the 2000s. All in all, the X-Men were what the kids call a big frickin' deal. So how could Marvel, under the control of their new villainous mouse-eared overlords, possibly mess that up? Well, it comes down to three huge reasons, all of which kind of feed into one another. First, the business of the X-Men. Second, the characters of the X-Men. And third, the stories of the X-Men. Let's start with how bad the business side of things became, and to do that, we have to talk about one Kevin Feige. Now, you might not realize this, but Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige has a really long history with the X-Men movie series. He began his career as an assistant to filmmaker Lauren Shuler Donner, and his first big job was on a little movie she was making called X-Men. Yeah, the first movie Kevin Feige ever produced was the 2000 X-Men film, and his work on it impressed the studio so much that they kept bringing him back to work on other Marvel movies. Even as he moved on to head the MCU, Feige never forgot about the X-Men, and even planned out an X-Men cinematic universe that Fox didn't end up using. They probably should have listened to him instead of doing what, whatever the heck this was. Ooh! Grow those back. Does my sanity get a healing factor? Regardless, Feige also positioned the early MCU so it could cross over with the X-Men if possible, which would eventually happen with Marvel bringing in characters like Deadpool, Wolverine, and Professor X in phase four. But even back in 2008, an alternate version of the very first MCU post-credit scene was filmed with Nick Fury straight-up name-dropping mutants. As if gamma accidents, radioactive bug bites, and assorted mutants weren't enough. This was deliberately leaving the door open for a crossover which would have made sense for everybody. But then everything changed when the Mickey Mouse Club attacked. All right now, get out there and make me some money! In 2009, Disney bought Marvel, and what used to be the best thing for Marvel's characters suddenly wasn't for the parent company. Mike Perlmutter, Marvel's overall CEO at the time, ended up with about $2.5 billion in Disney stock, which immediately made Perlmutter part of the greater Disney machine. So he started spearheading decisions on behalf of the Mouse that were questionable, like not wanting to produce Captain Marvel or Black Panther because movies about women or black people would quote-unquote underperform, yikes! Feige almost quit over that, by the way, but hey, proved Perlmutter wrong in the end, so you know. But as for the X-Men, starting in the early 2010s, fans started to notice that there was a lot less X-Men merchandise than there used to be. All of a sudden, you couldn't find any toys, action figures, or T-shirts featuring the new movies, or new characters from the comics to save your life. If you know anything about the movie business, that should raise some red flags because this sort of merch is a huge moneymaker for the movie studios. Just for a frame of reference, Disney makes somewhere between $2 and $3 billion on Star Wars merch every year. Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made. And it's an even bigger deal because Disney specifically bought Marvel to have a strong IP that they could market to boys and sell merch for. So what was going on here? Why was there suddenly nothing on store shelves for what was arguably Marvel's second biggest brand at the time? Well, even though Fox owned the film rights to the X-Men franchise, Disney still owned the merchandising rights and refused to make any merch advertising their competitor. And that's not even me speculating. Forbes reported that Disney flat out refused to make any content for any of the Fox X-Men or Fantastic Four movies, and one of Marvel's own editors also admitted to it. And so characters like Storm, Wolverine, and Magneto were replaced by the likes of Black Panther, Captain America, or the Guardians of the Galaxy. What's more, after Disney moved Marvel's animation in-house around 2012, they canceled all of the ongoing animated Marvel shows, including Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and Wolverine and the X-Men. However, while most of their characters were immediately rebooted into new shows like Avengers Assembled, Ultimate Spider-Man, Hulk and the Agents of Smash, and Guardians of the Galaxy, there wasn't a new X-Men cartoon in sight. In fact, there wouldn't be another X-Men animated series until this year with X-Men 97, over a decade since Wolverine and the X-Men ended. All in all, between the merch and these animated shows and everything else, for almost 10 years, Disney did their darndest to make the X-Men bad business. But okay, it would be one thing if it was just a case of Disney not selling action figures and t-shirts for the new X-Men movies, or canceling X-Men cartoons, or whatever. It might be dumb and hurt a brand that they own, but it's not completely over the top, especially if the X-Men characters in the comics were still getting some tender loving care. Well, here's where we run into problem number two, Disney's treatment of X-Men characters and specifically the creation of new X-Men characters. See, it's tradition at this point for every writer who hops onto an X-Men book to make their own mutants, whether that's new students at the school, new villains for them to fight, or just interesting characters to populate the world, right? This is how we end up getting so many characters that become long-running, iconic members of the team. Not every one of them's gonna be a hit, but some are, and having new characters for later generations of writers to build upon creates really rich stories. All in all, it's a very smart way to expand the brand. However, if you were reading X-Men comics throughout the 2010s, you may have noticed that there just weren't that many new mutants in the pages. It almost felt like there was some sort of ban on making new X-Men characters or something. And, well, that's exactly what was going on. Chris Claremont, a writer who's been working on X-Men for over 40 years and co-created many of the most iconic mutants, said in 2014 that creatives were more or less banned from making new X-Men characters. Why? Because Disney didn't want to give their competition at Fox any new characters to use in their movies. Talk about petty. If you were reading X-Men comics at the time like I was, this definitely felt true. But even then, that wouldn't make sense, right? It would be like cutting off your nose with an adamantium claw just to spite your face. I wanted some hard data to see if Claremont was right, so I went through every issue of every major X-Men comic book I could find from the 2000s and 2010s, up until Disney finished its buyout of Fox in mid-2019 and counted how many new characters appeared in each one. Basically, I was looking for characters that were original ideas, were tied to the X-Men instead of just crossing over into the books, and weren't just background extras or plot devices. And honestly, the number difference shocked me. Throughout the 2000s, I counted 286 brand new characters. It felt like you couldn't go 10 issues without four or five new mutants being introduced, and these weren't all just random one-offs either. Many are still mainline members of the X-Men teams, appeared in X-Men films, or remained fan favorites to this day. These characters are important parts of the brand now, and yet, throughout the 2010s, I found just 115 new characters, basically a third of what we had in the 2000s, a massive lion's share of which debuted in the early 2010s, likely before any ban went into effect. That, or the characters, weren't even mutants. Yeah, a lot of them were like demons or aliens or something, with very little personality created for the existing X-Men to fight. With these numbers, I'd say that Claremont was right. We don't know exactly when this ban went into effect, but there was a sharp decline after 2012. And with this sort of handicap imposed by Disney on the writers of the X-Men, it led to a lot of issues, resulting in major problem number three, the stories. Because there weren't many new, interesting characters added into the mix, a lot of X-Men storylines had to start looking for other antagonists, meaning that the conflict in these stories saw the X-Men fighting each other, or the Avengers, or the Inhumans, or themselves from the past. Yes, really, basically anything other than creating new mutants to fight or fight alongside. And this left the X-Men in an awful place, enough so that it sure felt like Disney was trying to sabotage the IP. Some examples? The X-Men had a harsh disagreement over how to handle a mutant attacking the U.N., leading to the schism storyline that fractured the team in two under the leadership of Cyclops and Wolverine. Slowly but surely, Cyclops became more militaristic and isolationist, and by the time of the Avengers versus X-Men event, Cyclops was basically the villain. He killed Professor X and became more and more like Magneto, turning the Boy Scout leader of the X-Men into a radical that most of the Marvel Universe didn't agree with. He was eventually arrested and then died during the Death of X storyline. That's brutal, but his rival Wolverine didn't have it much better. He was also straight up killed in an event called the Death of Wolverine, and his faction of the X-Men were transported into limbo for their own protection. They literally went to hell because it was preferable to what was going on on Earth. And even then, less popular characters also weren't safe from this meddling. For example, Fox and Disney had a sort of shared custody of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch due to their history with both the X-Men and the Avengers. But Disney did their best to scrub any history with the mutants off of the twins. In the comics, the pair had famously been the children of Magneto, but that family connection was retconned in 2014. This decision frustrated fans, and frankly, it took one of the most interesting families in the Marvel Universe and broke it up in a way that made very little story sense. All just to be petty to a rival film studio. And somehow, all of that wasn't even the worst of it. That same year, Marvel and Disney created a new Inhuman character named Miss Marvel and really pushed her, enough that she was wildly successful and has already made the jump to live action in the MCU. But get this, originally, she wasn't going to be an Inhuman. Instead, her co-creators wanted her to be a mutant. They've never explained why she wasn't a mutant, but it's obvious that this coincided with the ban on new X-Men characters and Marvel really pushing the Inhumans. And speaking of, oh man, the Inhumans. So if you don't know who the Inhumans are, I mean, that's fair. I'm still trying to scrub the TV show out of my brain. But the Inhumans are a group of superheroes that are feared and hated, born as seemingly normal people, but gain their powers later in life after having their dormant Inhuman DNA activated by a substance called the Terrigen Mists. Huh, that sounds familiar. Kind of like how mutants are feared and hated, born as seemingly normal people, but gain their powers later in life after having their dormant mutant gene activated by a substance called puberty. That is some serious, hey, can I copy your homework energy right there. As you can tell, the Inhumans have a lot in common with the X-Men, and Disney sure noticed this too, starting to push them as their own replacement for mutants in the MCU. I think Kevin Feige really summed it up best here. We really do believe that the Inhumans can be a franchise and perhaps series of franchises onto themselves. Now, if this was just limited to movies and TV shows, that'd be fine, it'd be whatever, right? It would just be another group of new characters for everyone to enjoy. But that's not what happened. After this push by Disney to make Inhumans their next big thing, it started influencing the story in the comics too. In the early 2010s, an event called Inhumanity saw the Terrigen Mists cover the entire planet and awaken all dormant Inhumans. But it also revealed that the Mists were lethal to mutants. A ton of mutants died during this time from the Mists. This is actually how Cyclops himself died, like I mentioned earlier. All in all, this was just a naked attempt by Marvel and Disney to replace the X-Men with the Inhumans, something that nobody outside of a Disney shareholder meeting actually wanted. Let's just say that there's a reason that the 2010s are called the Lost Decade of the X-Men. So all of that is a fascinating story, but why tell it? Why should you care about this? Well, for a couple of reasons. The first is something that we always love to do here, and that's to dunk on Disney in just how spectacularly they missed the point of the X-Men. See, the X-Men have always been characters that do the right thing and help people in spite of being feared just for who they are and hated for being born different. It's a clear, obvious allegory for how marginalized people in the real world face a similar sort of discrimination. All throughout history, there have been a lot of bad people who would rather that the quote-unquote undesirables just didn't exist, and sadly tried to make that a reality. X-Men writers have been using those real-world events as inspiration for their stories for decades at this point, with characters and organizations like William Stryker, the Purifiers, the Sentinels, Operation Zero Tolerance, Orcus, and so many more hunting mutants just for being born different, for something they had no control over. And more or less, that's exactly what Disney tried to do with the X-Men in a meta sense. They hid them, they stopped selling toys, they put a ban on making new mutants, they pushed storylines that killed main characters or turned them into villains, and they straight up tried to replace the X-Men with the Inhumans because that was more convenient for them. And believe me, if Disney could have gotten away with it, they would have canceled everything related to the X-Men, including the comic books. Around this time, the Fantastic Four, another Marvel IP that Fox owned the film rights to, was canceled for the first time since it launched in the 60s, because its sales were low enough to justify it. Disney wanted to kill the X-Men. And yet, despite doing their best to smother this brand, the X-Men still made bank in the 2010s. They survived. 40 of the top 300 comic issues of the 2010s starred the X-Men, a solid 13% of those top spots. Now, don't get me wrong, that's still down from the 2000s, which saw 20% of its top 300 star the X-Men, but that's still incredibly impressive considering how much was going against the X-Men in this decade. And now, after they once again own the X-Men film rights that they have the entire piece of this pie, Disney is trying to take advantage of the X-Men. I am not making this up, but basically the second Disney bought Fox, the X-Men saw a new storyline relaunch that revitalized the whole brand. All mutants came together and formed a new supernation. They revived all the characters that had been dead for 10, 20, 30 years or more. They discovered a new culture of mutants that split from Earth thousands of years ago and introduced hundreds of new characters. They fricking terraformed Mars. And all of that's without mentioning that Magneto basically made up with Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch and that they're a family again, or that Ms. Marvel died for all of a month and was then resurrected as a mutant. Disney and Marvel tried to repair all of the damage they themselves caused the X-Men because now they positively affect the bottom line. It's greedy, it's hollow, it's transparent. It's basically like a corporation like Disney changing their logo during Pride Month and selling rainbow merch to make money off of those same marginalized people. Finally, I wanna leave you with this. Yeah, it's fun to dunk on Disney, but what I really wanna do here is help you recognize why the stories being told are the stories being told. As entertainment industries like film, TV, and video games continue to consolidate, as the franchises and characters that we love are bought up by the same six or seven conglomerates, more stupid behind-the-scenes drama like this is going to happen. The stories that make it to your eyeballs rarely do so without being touched by someone with an agenda, even if it's just to optimize the amount of money that they make by exploiting or killing the franchises that you love. The X-Men might be the best example that I can think of, but they're not nearly the only one, and I want you to have the tools to recognize that and say, enough. Huh, maybe that's your real mutant power. But hey, that's just a theory, a film theory, and cut. And if you want another Marvel theory right now, check out how Deadpool might just prove that the entire MCU is a simulation.
