The debut of Marvel’s Punisher spinoff brings the grand total of MCU and X-universe series up to eleven; soon to be twelve with Hulu’s Runaways. From the slums of Hell’s Kitchen to the moon, the time is now to rank all of Marvel’s current-generation live-action series, including our beloved Defenders, mutants and more.
Although X-Men: Apocalypse and the latest Fantastic Four reboot were fairly notable disappointments for 20th Century Fox, the studio is doing pretty, pretty, prett-ay good in the Marvel department. Thanks to the critical and commercial success of Deadpool and Logan, Fox’s X-universe has been revitalized, and even if the next X-Men movie underperforms, they still have New Mutants, X-Force and Deadpool 2 on the way — and it looks as though that may be the tip of the iceberg.
I’m an old enough nerd to remember when the first X-Men movie came out in theaters. At that time, comic books were not the number one driver of all things in popular culture. Bryan Singer’s X-Men certainly featured all the comic’s beloved heroes and villains, but there did seem like there was a concerted effort to tamp down some of their comic-book-ness. Everyone dressed in black. There was no spandex. The story was grounded in weighty real-world themes like prejudice and vengeance. It was the X-Men you knew, but watered down just a bit. It was a rum and coke, not a shot of gin. X-Men: Apocalypse, in comparison, looks like a bottle of Beefeater.