The Original X-Men Movie Trailer Is One of Marvel’s Weirdest Ever

The main cast of the original X-Men movies (2003)Today, the internet goes gaga for all things related to the live-action X-Men. That’s partially why Marvel Studios announced several X-Men actors as among the first Avengers: Doomsday cast members. It’s a testament to the tremendous fanbase these films procured over their 20 years of existence, as well as their enduring popularity in MCU productions like Deadpool & Wolverine.

Even dismal productions like Dark Phoenix and X-Men Origins: Wolverine couldn’t dilute the high standing folks have for these merry mutants.Still, the X-Men film series had to start somewhere and those origins were back in July 2000 with the original X-Men. Launching just three years after Batman & Robin and only two years after Blade’s success, it was anyone’s guess if X-Men could actually click with moviegoers.



To hype up the production’s imminent arrival, 20th Century Fox kicked off the X-Men marketing campaign with a teaser trailer that’s certainly one of the strangest ever for a Marvel movie adaptation.What Happens in This X-Men Teaser?There are only 12 seconds of build-up in the X-Men teaser before Storm (Halle Berry) imposingly remarks, “Hold on to something.” Then, a rapid-fire montage begins giving viewers very fleeting glimpses of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Patrick Stewart’s Xavier, and other mutant characters.

The tagline “Change is coming” emerges on-screen one word at a time before culminating in an action beat of Wolverine twirling around the top of the Statue of Liberty before flashing his adamantium claws. Xavier remarks to someone off-screen, “we’re not what you think,” before the tagline “the evolution is coming” appears, accompanied by X-Men’s July 14 release date.A year after X-Men hit theaters, Spider-Man began its marketing campaign with a more classical teaser trailer consisting of footage shot just for the trailer.

Meanwhile, the inaugural X-Men teaser is a piece of marketing that could only have existed in 1999 or 2000. The quick cuts, and especially the brief moments where new pieces of footage “flicker” on-screen before fully materializing, were all quite common in late 90s/early 2000s media. This is how “extreme” media was presented to the youth of the era, and Fox marketers wanted to mold the first X-Men movie accordingly.

[RELATED: The 7 Worst Marvel Cinematic Universe Trailers]Even that Spider-Man teaser concluded with a very early 2000s needle drop, so of course the X-Men teaser is accompanied by techno music that sounds like the hottest club track of 1998. The teaser music especially sounds evocative of similar techno tunes featured in the marketing for another summer 2000 20th Century Fox tentpole, Titan A.E.

That’s just a sign of how ubiquitous this style of music was back at the dawn of the 21st century, though it doesn’t make the teaser music any less weird to experience. What really solidifies the teaser’s strangeness, though, is its timidity over showing mutant superpowers.Why Are Mutant Powers Being Concealed?20th Century Studios In just a 59-second teaser, the first X-Men trailer doesn’t have a lot of time to show off mutant superpowers besides Wolverine’s claws.

Audiences briefly see Magneto pull away people’s guns or Storm calling down lightning, but there’s clearly hesitation in fully showing off these heightened mutant superpowers. That’s a sharp contrast to later Marvel adaptation trailers that leaned heavily into the oddest qualities of their respective characters. The iconic Guardians of the Galaxy teaser made no qualms about the film starring a gun-toting raccoon or a massively strong tree, for instance.

Heck, even the Ant-Man teaser, cobbled together from a movie that had only finished shooting a few weeks earlier, featured test footage of Scott Lang shrinking and riding on an ant as Ant-Man. The X-Men teaser, meanwhile, suggests superpowers rather than showing them. Even subsequent X-Men teasers, like the one for X-Men: First Class or, of course, Deadpool’s inaugural trailer, wouldn’t be so close to the chest with superpowers.

Still, in a post-Batman & Robin world, studios were sheepish over comic book movies and especially coming off as “silly.”So it was with the X-Men teaser, which only teased the very heightened superpowers that made these characters iconic. Between that, the very late 90s techno needle drop, and odd details like the refusal to show off the film’s title (though a URL at the very end confirms it’s an X-Men movie) certainly makes this teaser an incredibly weird creation.

It’s not necessarily a bad one, though. The X-Men teaser is just a peculiarly obvious time capsule of 1999/2000 movie marketing, not to mention practically from a different dimension compared to even other Marvel movie marketing materials from the same era.X-Men is now streaming on Disney+.

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