X-Men Collection

Wolverine was cast twice before the version everyone knows got the part. Dougray Scott had the role first and had to drop out over scheduling conflicts on Mission: Impossible II, which ran well over schedule. The replacement came in last-minute: Hugh Jackman, a genuinely unknown Australian actor whose only prior film credit was something called Paperback Hero, pulled out of a London stage production of Oklahoma! to take the part. He showed up for filming having done only a few weeks of physical training, which was enough of a problem that Bryan Singer rearranged the shooting schedule specifically to push Jackman's shirtless scenes later in production, buying him time in the gym before the cameras got there.

Singer's involvement itself came from a deliberate choice, not a default one — producer Tom DeSanto specifically wanted him because he thought Singer's own relationship to themes of social prejudice made him the right director for material built around a persecuted minority learning to live in a hostile world. That shows up most directly in the opening: the film starts in a 1944 Polish concentration camp, with a young Erik Lehnsherr — the future Magneto — torn from his parents as his powers first manifest under duress. It's an unusually serious way to open a comic book movie, and it wasn't universally welcomed at the time either — at least one contemporary review specifically criticized the choice to hand Magneto a sympathetic Holocaust-survivor backstory rather than treating him as a straightforward villain.

The costume change that came with all this got its own joke built right into the script. Singer replaced the comics' yellow-and-blue spandex with black leather, a choice producer Ralph Winter has said was a direct response the filmmakers knew fans wouldn't love — so when Wolverine complains about the new uniform on screen, Cyclops's deadpan answer, "What would you prefer, yellow spandex?", is the film talking directly back to the audience it expected to be annoyed. Whatever the costume debate, the film's opening weekend set the strongest box-office numbers ever recorded at that point for a brand-new film franchise — not a sequel, not an established hit, a completely new property outperforming everything that had come before it, right at the moment the modern superhero movie era was actually beginning.