X-Men Timeline: Every Movie in Story Order

The X-Men timeline begins long before the team exists, with two separate origin stories that the films place at the very start. X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens in the 1840s, when a boy named James Howlett sees his father killed and his bone claws burst out for the first time. He and his half-brother Victor Creed then grow up as soldiers who barely age, fighting in one American war after another until Major William Stryker pulls them out of a Vietnam firing squad and into a secret team of mutant operatives. Logan leaves, builds a quiet life in Canada with Kayla Silverfox, and loses her to Victor. Stryker then bonds adamantium to his skeleton, and Logan ends the film with no memory of any of it.

The other starting point is 1944. X-Men: First Class, directed by Matthew Vaughn, shows young Erik Lehnsherr bending a gate in a Nazi camp while Klaus Schmidt, later Sebastian Shaw, kills his mother. By 1962 Charles Xavier and Erik recruit Hank McCoy, Alex Summers, Sean Cassidy, Angel and Darwin, and the Cuban Missile Crisis becomes their first battle. Erik takes the name Magneto, Charles is paralyzed by a stray bullet, and the school opens. Our chronological order lists First Class first and Origins second, even though Origins opens earlier, in the 1840s. The two stories overlap, so their placement is a judgment call. In release order the pair arrived the other way round, Origins in 2009 and First Class in 2011.

The original trilogy takes place in a near future where mutants are already public, and it runs from the first registration debate to the death of Jean Grey. X-Men (2000), directed by Bryan Singer, follows Logan and Rogue to Xavier's school as Senator Kelly pushes for a Mutant Registration Act and Magneto plots to turn the world leaders gathered at Ellis Island into mutants. The climactic fight takes place on the Statue of Liberty, and Xavier ends the film promising Magneto that he will be there to stop him.

X2 (2003), also directed by Singer, begins with Nightcrawler attacking the President and Colonel Stryker raiding the school. Magneto and the X-Men form an uneasy alliance, and Jean Grey sacrifices herself at Alkali Lake so the X-Jet can escape the flooding dam. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), directed by Brett Ratner, follows a mutant cure from Worthington Labs. Jean returns with the Phoenix in control, Cyclops and Xavier are lost, and Wolverine is forced to kill her on Alcatraz Island. Magneto is depowered by the cure, and a post credit scene suggests Xavier survives in some form.

The Wolverine (2013), directed by James Mangold, sits directly after The Last Stand and is the bridge into the film that rewrites the timeline. It opens in 1945 with Logan as a prisoner of war near Nagasaki, shielding the officer Ichiro Yashida from the atomic blast. In the present day Logan is a hermit in the Yukon, haunted by visions of Jean, until Yukio brings him to Tokyo and Yashida offers to take his healing factor. The story ends with Logan defeating Yashida inside the Silver Samurai armor and finally letting Jean go.

The mid credits scene is the important part for timeline purposes. Two years later, Magneto meets Logan at an airport and warns him of a new threat, and a living Professor X appears beside him. That scene hands the story directly to X-Men: Days of Future Past.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), directed by Bryan Singer, is the film that creates the original and revised timelines by erasing the grim future the earlier movies had been heading toward. In 2023 the Sentinels have nearly wiped out mutantkind, so Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine's consciousness back to 1973. There he finds a broken young Xavier, frees a young Magneto from a Pentagon cell with help from Quicksilver, and tries to stop Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask. Her decision to spare Trask and save President Nixon cancels the Sentinel program.

Logan wakes in a restored present where friends who were dead in the old timeline are alive again. The film also brings the older cast of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen together with the First Class cast of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. It ends with a post credit scene in ancient Egypt, where En Sabah Nur is worshipped as pyramids are raised.

Two films play out in the revised timeline after Days of Future Past, and both are younger ensemble stories set in the 1980s and 1990s. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), directed by Bryan Singer, takes place in 1983, when the ancient mutant En Sabah Nur wakes and recruits Storm, Psylocke, Angel and, eventually, Magneto as his Horsemen. Scott Summers arrives at the school and meets Jean Grey, and by the end Hank and Raven train a new team of Scott, Jean, Ororo, Kurt and Peter. A post credit scene shows Essex Corporation collecting blood, a link to Mister Sinister.

Dark Phoenix (2019), directed by Simon Kinberg, runs from 1975 to 1992. Young Jean causes the car crash that kills her parents, and in 1992 she absorbs a cosmic force during a shuttle rescue. Raven dies, Hank joins Magneto in hunting Jean, and the D'Bari leader Vuk tries to use Jean's power. Jean forgives Xavier, kills Vuk in space and burns away as a phoenix. The school is renamed in her honor and Xavier steps back, ending the Fox X-Men series.

The two Deadpool films belong to the Fox universe, and this timeline places them after Dark Phoenix in story order. Deadpool (2016), directed by Tim Miller, tells how the mercenary Wade Wilson is tortured by Ajax into mutating, then hunts him with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead standing in his way. Deadpool 2, directed by David Leitch, follows Wade into grief after Vanessa dies, a short stint as a trainee X-Man, and a fight to protect the young mutant Russell from the time traveling Cable.

Ryan Reynolds also plays Wade Wilson in Origins, which is one reason fans argue about where the character belongs.

Logan (2017), directed by James Mangold, is set in 2029 and closes the timeline as the latest dated story. No new mutants have been born for years, Logan drives a limo near the Mexican border while his healing power fades, and he secretly cares for an ailing Charles Xavier alongside Caliban. When the nurse Gabriela pays him to take a girl named Laura to a place called Eden, Transigen's Donald Pierce hunts them with cyborg soldiers.

Laura turns out to be one of many children bred from mutant DNA, and she is effectively Logan's daughter. X-24, a savage clone of Logan, kills Xavier and the Munson family, and later fatally stabs Logan before Laura kills the clone with an adamantium bullet. Logan dies in Laura's arms, and she tips his cross into an X. This is the end point of the Wolverine story on screen, which is why we place it last among the dated films.

The New Mutants (2020), directed by Josh Boone, is a self contained story, and it sits last in the chronological order. Dani Moonstar wakes in an isolated hospital run by Dr. Cecilia Reyes and meets Sam, Roberto, Rahne and Illyana, each with powers and a painful past. The group learns that Reyes is preparing them as weapons for a corporation, and Dani's fear takes shape as the Demon Bear.

Illyana fetches her Soulsword, Dani faces her fear and calms the creature, and the teens walk out together at dawn. The film closes on the group as a new team, with no further story shown.

The X-Men timeline never worked as a single clean line, and in my opinion that is part of its charm. The cleanest way to read it is as two overlapping lines: an original one that runs through X-Men (2000), X2 and The Last Stand, and a revised one that begins when Mystique spares Trask in 1973. It could be argued that the original line is not erased so much as replaced, because Days of Future Past only erases the 2023 future, not the earlier films.

The cast list shows how messy the seams are. Stryker is played by Danny Huston in Origins, Brian Cox in X2 and Josh Helman in Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, so three actors cover what should be one man. Jean Grey dies in X2 and The Last Stand, then returns as Sophie Turner in Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix.

Is Wolverine over 200 years old? On screen, no. Origins puts his birth in the 1840s, so even in Logan (2029) he would be roughly 180 to 190. My advice if you are new to this: watch in story order for the plot, but treat Days of Future Past as the dividing line, and read the Deadpool and New Mutants entries as loosely placed. For release dates, see our X-Men movies in order guide.