'X-Men: The Last Stand,' the Most Inconsequential Marvel Movie Ever, Is Now on Disney+

As the streaming home of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney+ has arguably the best lineup of superhero content in all of streaming. It's an impressive roster featuring Oscar winners (Black Panther), mega blockbusters (Avengers: Endgame), and major cultural turning points (Iron Man). And with Disney's acquisition of Fox ahead of the launch of Disney+ in 2019, the service has slowly started to expand its impeccable library with, uh, other Marvel movies. Fox's old slate of Marvel movies have popped up on Disney+ every few weeks for the past year or so, movies like the reviled 2015 Fantastic Four movie and also 2007's comparably not awful Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Now Disney+ has added another film from Fox's X-Men franchise. You can stream X-Men: The Last Stand on Disney+ if you want to see the most inconsequential superhero movie ever.

Directed with a dull, point-and-shoot style by Brett Ratner, X-Men: The Last Stand was—at the time—a lackluster end to the franchise that made superheroes a viable genre in the 21st century. We now know that wasn't the case. There were actually a few more flashes of greatness and/or originality left in the franchise (X-Men: First Class, Logan, Deadpool, I'd even be controversial-yet-brave and say New Mutants). But at the time? X-Men: The Last Stand was a Juggernaut-sized bummer that wasted Beast and Kitty Pryde, killed Cyclops offscreen, completely sidelined Rogue, and turned "The Dark Phoenix Saga" into a story about Wolverine. And, insult to injury, none of it mattered. None of it mattered three times over.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, Famke Janssen as Dark Phoenix
©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Obviously none of it mattered because Disney and Marvel Studios now have the film rights to the X-Men to use as they see fit, thus giving the characters the clean slate they so deserve. So in that respect, none of the X-Movies matter—except maybe the Deadpool films, because if any sub-franchise can fold being sold to a new corporate overlord into its bonkers narrative, it's that one. But X2? Logan? Days of Future Past? None of them no longer "matter" in the way that hardcore superhero fans demand.

But X-Men: The Last Stand was already erased from continuity before Disney gobbled up Fox! Remember, the whole point of 2014's time travel epic X-Men: Days of Future Past was to completely reset the X-movie timeline—and it did! It wiped X-Men: The Last Stand from continuity, as well as the first two X-Men movies and… probably the Wolverine movies? Honestly, the X-Men movie timeline more complicated than Cable's and Psylocke's origins combined.

Halle Berry as Storm in X-Men The Last Stand
©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection

Both of those resets were fine, though, compared to the first reset—which happened in literally the final minutes of The Last Stand itself. The two biggest swings in The Last Stand were the murder of Professor X and the introduction of a mutant "cure" that left Magneto and Mystique human against their wills and Rogue de-powered by choice. Xavier dead and Magneto powerless? Those are big, bold moves for a movie to take—and this damn movie couldn't even commit to those choices. A post-credits scene reveals that Xavier is alive, waking up in a comatose body on Muir Island. On top of that, the last scene of The Last Stand, shows Magneto nudging a metal chess piece with his mind! The cure doesn't even work! All that hoopla, all that destruction and death could've been avoided if the cure—like the COVID vaccine currently coursing through my own body—came with a two-week waiting period after injection! Instead, oops, turns out this cure is absolute crap! Back to the morally dubious drawing board!

To recap: X-Men: The Last Stand is a movie that was undone by its own ending, then undone again by Days of Future Past, and then undone a third time by Fox's sale to Disney. Truly, could a movie matter less??? But hey—X-Men: The Last Stand matters enough to Disney to throw it on their streaming service, and I guess that's ultimately all that matters. Even after having reality rewritten around it three times, The Last Stand still exists. Kinda like the X-Men themselves, this movie just can't die.

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  • Disney+
  • Marvel
  • X-Men: The Last Stand