The X-Men movies are finally coming to Disney Plus this summer in the US, after a long wait. The mutant-themed superhero films, which were originally made by studio 20th Century Fox rather than the MCU stewards at Marvel Studios, have been released in other territories with the streaming service, but not in the US so far.
X-Men: Days of Future Past (July 10), X-Men: Apocalypse (July 17), X-Men (August 7) and standalone movie The Wolverine (September 4) all have dates, along with Fox's first (and by default best) Fantastic Four movie (August 28).
This is all part of an initiative called 'Summer Movie Nights', which also sees the non-Disney, non-superhero musical The Greatest Showman arrive on 14 August.
Of those four X-Men movies, one is great (the time-hopping Days of Future Past) two are good (the original X-Men and The Wolverine) and one is terrible (Apocalypse). It's not quite enough for a marathon, though, since gaps remain in the library.
The remaining X-Men movies still waiting for a Disney Plus release are X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: First Class and last year's flop Dark Phoenix.
They'll likely make the leap to Disney Plus eventually. In the UK, for example, subscribers can already watch X-Men, The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Days of Future Past.
Logan, probably the best movie of all of them, will almost certainly never be released on Disney Plus because of its adult content. The same goes for the Deadpool films.
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Are the X-Men movies still worth watching?
The X-Men movies are incredibly erratic, but very entertaining overall. While last year's Dark Phoenix made fans beg Marvel Studios to just make its own X-Men films (which is happening now), people forget that Fox also came up with the kind of bold superhero flicks you'd never see in the MCU.
Logan and Deadpool both required a movie studio to convince themselves superhero movies aren't just for kids. It was a heck of a gambit (no pun intended) that paid off, and suggested it was creatively healthy for the superhero sub-genre to be shaped by different people, rather than just two dominant studios in Warner Bros and Disney (though Sony holds the Spider-Man movie rights).
Still, the X-Men movies also had much lower lows than the MCU, with the likes of The Last Stand and Apocalypse feeling like big missed opportunities.
One final Fox X-Men movie, The New Mutants, is due for release on August 28.
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