X-Men: First ClassSave

The film opens with an extended flashback to 1944 in occupied Poland, expanding the original X-Men's opening scene. A young Erik Lehnsherr has just demonstrated his magnetism powers at the camp gate. The local SS officer Klaus Schmidt — who specializes in mutant-research — locks Erik in a chamber, brings his mother in front of him, and threatens to kill her if Erik cannot demonstrate his powers on command. Erik cannot. Schmidt shoots Erik's mother dead in front of him. The pain triggers a massive magnetic reaction that destroys most of the camp's metal structures. Schmidt watches with delight, recognizing he has unlocked Erik's full power. Cut to the early 1960s. Erik is hunting Schmidt across the world, having become a Nazi-hunting vigilante.

On a separate track, an adult Charles Xavier (still walking, his paralysis decades away) is a charismatic Oxford-educated geneticist studying mutant-related anomalies. His foster sister Raven — a young blue-skinned shape-shifter the audience knows as the future Mystique — has been with him since childhood. The two are recruited by CIA agent Moira MacTaggert to help her identify what appears to be a covert mutant network operating around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The investigation leads them to the Hellfire Club, a high-society organization run by Sebastian Shaw — who is, in fact, the same Klaus Schmidt who killed Erik's mother in 1944. Shaw has been collecting and training mutants to position himself to trigger and survive a global nuclear war.

Shaw's Hellfire Club includes Emma Frost (a telepath who can transform her body to diamond), Azazel (a teleporter), Riptide (a hurricane-controller), and Angel (a winged stripper-turned-recruit). Shaw is preparing to manipulate the U.S. and Soviet Union into nuclear conflict. He believes the radiation from a global nuclear exchange will accelerate human evolution into the next mutant generation, with himself as the natural inheritor. Charles, Raven, Erik (who has finally tracked Shaw to the Bahamas), and Moira form an alliance with the CIA. They begin recruiting young mutants worldwide using Cerebro — a device designed by Hank McCoy, the CIA's resident mutant scientist who is still hiding his own ape-like physical features.

The newly assembled team — Charles, Erik, Raven, Hank McCoy, Banshee (a sonic-scream user), Havok (an energy-projection mutant who is Cyclops's older brother), and Darwin (an evolutionary-adaption mutant) — trains at a covert CIA facility. Erik and Charles bond intensely; their training sessions with each other are some of the film's most quietly powerful sequences. The mutual-respect-evolving-into-friendship dynamic establishes the foundational relationship of the entire X-Men mythology. Hank McCoy creates the team's first leather X-Men uniforms. The team is preparing for a confrontation when Shaw's strike team — joined by his lieutenants Azazel and Riptide — assaults the CIA facility, killing several CIA agents and Darwin (who fails to adapt to Shaw's energy attack), and recruiting Angel.

The team relocates to Charles's family mansion in Westchester. Hank refines a serum that he hopes will normalize his appearance; instead, when he tests it, it transforms him into a fully blue-furred Beast form he can never reverse. The serum's failure forces Hank to confront the same shame about his identity that Raven has spent her life navigating. Raven, who has been hiding her natural blue-skinned form in human disguise, finally embraces it after extended conversations with Erik (who has been telling her that mutants should never feel ashamed of who they are). The personal-philosophical thread between Erik's pride-in-mutant-identity and Charles's hopeful-integration-with-humanity becomes the film's central tension.

The Cuban Missile Crisis arrives. Shaw is using a Soviet ship to transport ten nuclear warheads toward American waters; he plans to fire one at the U.S., trigger a Soviet counter-attack, and leverage the resulting global radiation. The X-Men deploy to a small island near Cuban waters where Shaw's submarine has rendezvoused with the Soviet ship. The team's plane is shot down. Erik raises Shaw's submarine from the ocean floor and brings it to the surface. Charles telepathically immobilizes Shaw inside the submarine while Erik enters and confronts him directly. Shaw, freed by Charles for ethical reasons, attempts to kill Erik. Erik instead drives the helmet's resonance into Shaw's body, slowly forcing a coin (the same Polish currency Shaw had given Erik in 1944) through Shaw's skull, killing him.

Outside the submarine, the U.S. and Soviet fleets — newly aware of mutant existence — open fire on the island. They are firing on the X-Men. Erik intercepts every missile and torpedo with magnetism, redirecting them back toward the human ships. Charles begs him to stand down. Erik, having lost faith in human-mutant coexistence after watching Shaw's deception and the immediate human response, refuses. Charles physically tackles him. In the struggle, a Soviet missile strikes the beach near Charles. A bullet from a CIA agent ricochets off Erik's deflection field and lands in Charles's spine. Charles is permanently paralyzed. Erik takes Mystique, Azazel, Riptide, and Angel and leaves to form what will become the Brotherhood. Charles takes the surviving humans and his loyal mutants back to the mansion to begin the school.

X-Men: First Class grossed $355 million globally on a $160 million budget. The film successfully reset the X-Men franchise after the disappointment of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and X-Men: The Last Stand. Director Matthew Vaughn brought a Bond-style espionage register and 1960s spy-film visual identity that distinguished it from the previous X-Men films. James McAvoy's young Charles and Michael Fassbender's young Erik, both giving career-defining performances, became the franchise's continuing leads through Days of Future Past, Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix. Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique, in her breakout pre-Hunger-Games role, earned both critical praise and significant franchise screen time across the next three films. The film's ending — establishing how Charles's paralysis happened and how the X-Men/Brotherhood split originated — provided the entire prior trilogy with retroactive depth that fans had not previously imagined.

The film's blend of period-piece production design and superhero spectacle was a deliberate creative choice. Set decoration, costumes, score, and even the title sequence were all designed to evoke 1960s spy films, particularly the early Bond entries. Vaughn shot key sequences on location in 1960s-era buildings, which gave the picture a tactile authenticity rare for blockbusters. Fassbender's Erik traveling across Argentina, Switzerland, and Las Vegas in pursuit of Shaw became one of the most memorable individual sequences in the entire franchise. Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw was an unexpected casting choice that paid off; his charismatic, multilingual menace gave the film a distinctive antagonist register. Hugh Jackman makes a brief but memorable cameo as Wolverine, recruited unsuccessfully by Charles and Erik in a single perfectly-timed scene. The film's commercial success greenlit the entire prequel-trilogy era of X-Men films.