Superhero fatigue, or at least the accusations of superhero fatigue, are nothing new. And if you were to ask people leaving the movie theater on May 26, 2006 — following a viewing of X-Men: The Last Stand — if the superhero genre was finally, and truly entering into a period of diminishing returns, the answers would have been a resounding yes. But although the X-Men would experience a massive comeback in 2011 with First Class, the strange irony of The Last Stand’s bad reputation, 20 years later, is that it’s not even close to being the worst X-Men movie, nor even among the worst superhero movies ever.
Following the beloved X2 in 2004, X-Men: The Last Stand, suffered partly because of the existence of another 2006 superhero movie, Superman Returns. Five key people from X2, including director Bryan Singer, composer John Ottman, writers Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty, and actor James Marsden (Cyclops), were all pulled away from X3 to work on Superman Returns. Brett Ratner eventually replaced Bryan Singer, which today is a bizarre downgrade from one problematic director to another. Or to put it another way, at least The Last Stand is better than Ratner’s most recent film, Melania.
