The X-Men Movies in Order

Why this order?

For most people, release order is the right way in. The series was built that way: each film assumes you've seen the ones before it, callbacks and casting gags land in sequence, and the tonal jumps (gritty 2000 origin, swashbuckling First Class, R-rated Deadpool) make sense as the franchise evolved. Start with X-Men (2000) and go straight down the release calendar and you'll never be confused.

Chronological order is the deep-dive, and it's genuinely tangled. The prequels reboot the cast in the past — First Class lands in 1962, Days of Future Past in 1973, Apocalypse in 1983, Dark Phoenix in 1992 — while the original trilogy and The Wolverine sit in the early-2000s "present." The two Wolverine solo films and Deadpool float around the edges, and Logan jumps all the way to 2029.

The big asterisk is Days of Future Past. Its whole plot is Wolverine being sent back to 1973 to rewrite history, which erases the future depicted in X-Men, X2, and The Last Stand and forks the series into a new timeline. So no chronological list is "correct" — the originals happen in a future that the prequels undo. Treat the chronological order below as one reasonable reading of the in-universe setting years, not canon law.

Practical takeaway: watch by release for a clean first run, then revisit chronologically if you want to untangle the timeline. Deadpool and Deadpool 2 are loosely connected R-rated comedies you can slot in by release without spoiling the main saga, and Logan works as a near-future capstone either way. If you landed here after Deadpool & Wolverine, note that it's an MCU film — part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not this Fox X-Men series — so it isn't on the list below.