Bob Hoskins as Wolverine? 'X-Men' Movies That Tried — and Failed — to Launch in the '80s and '90s

Storm, Wolverine, and Friends in ‘X2′ (Fox)

This weekend’s X-Men: Apocalypse makes it nine films in 16 years featuring Marvel’s super-powered mutant heroes, including two separate trilogies, two spinoffs starring Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and one irreverent surprise smash in this year’s Deadpool, It’s the superhero genre’s longest running continuous franchise, and it seems likely only to grow in the years to come, with big-screen possibilities being kicked around for X-Force and the New Mutants.

Related: How the First ‘X-Men’ Helped Create the Marvel Movie Universe

More than once, however, we came close to seeing an X-franchise that looked very different from the one we’ve come to know. Various filmmakers had been trying to make an X-Men movie for nearly 20 years before Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, and Co. finally made it on screen.

The First Try
Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the characters first appeared in print in 1963, and by the early 1980s, they’d become Marvel’s biggest-selling title. So naturally, Hollywood came calling. The first suitor was Canadian producer Michael Hirsh, who optioned the rights to a live-action X-Men movie near the start of the decade, with Orion Pictures set to distribute the film.

The business team kept the creative tasks within the family, hiring as writers former Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas and The Punisher creator Gerry Conway (they’d teamed up for a joint move into screenwriting, drafting an early script for Conan the Destroyer). Thomas’s fanzine Alter Ego describes the script they wrote for Hirsh, where a (walking) Charles Xavier assembles a team including Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, Colossus, Japanese pop-star Yoshi (a character created for the film: the producer deliberately wanted an international cast), and Wolverine to battle Stonewell, an industrialist who eats mutants and absorbs their powers(!), and the sentient island he serves(!!)

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It’s an ambitious story, surprisingly faithful to the comics to a degree that would have been tricky to pull off in the early 1980s. Ultimately, though, it feels a little too far out and techno-babble-y to get the job done. Orion seemingly lost interest, and the project withered, leaving the franchise dormant as a movie property until the late 1980s.

James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow Jump In
In 1990, future Titanic Oscar winner James Cameron was married to future Hurt Locker Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow. He had just launched his Lightstorm Entertainment when Stan Lee and Marvel artist Chris Claremont pitched the idea of an X-Men movie. A deal was struck, with Bigelow set to direct, and Total Recall and Big Trouble In Little China writer Gary Goldman hired to write a script.

Goldman’s script, dated June 1991 and titled Wolverine and the X-Men, features a young Kitty Pryde, who can phase through walls, being recruited to Xavier’s school by Wolverine (who, Claremont says, would have been played by Bob Hoskins, a very different direction from Hugh Jackman). Much of the script sees them training, but eventually they come into conflict with presidential candidate Thomas Prince, a politician with magnetic powers — oddly, he has Magneto’s powers, but is an entirely different character.

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For all the liberties it takes, Goldman’s draft isn’t bad, getting the teen soap elements of the X-Men more right than any version we’ve seen. But the project swiftly died: Claremont claimed that Cameron was always more interested in the Spider-Man movie he was planning at the same time.

Five Years of False Starts at Fox
Rights to the X-Men ended up at 20th Century Fox, where it spent the next five years cycling through a stack of writers and storylines. Andrew Kevin Walker, who’d sold the script that would become David Fincher’s Seven, wrote a good draft featuring mutant registration, sentinels, and a host of villains led by Magneto. Shutter Island writer Laeta Kalogridis took over from Walker, with a script featuring the mutant-targeting Legacy virus (a famous plot point in the comics) and 1990s cartoon favorite Jubilee. Future Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon pitched a (not all that great) take to Fox.

Finally, a script by fjrst-time screenwriter David Hayter made it to the screen in 2000 for Bryan Singer’s X-Men. Compared to the two decades prior, it’s been mostly smooth sailing for the franchise, though not without a couple of bumps in the road. Singer bailed on the third movie, X-Men: The Last Stand, with British Layer Cake helmer Matthew Vaughn hired to replace him. But Vaughn too walked away, just weeks before filming began, with the gig then going to Brett Ratner. (Vaughn would return to the fold for 2011’s X-Men: First Class, but quit Days Of Future Past, being replaced, almost inevitably, by Singer).

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The spinoffs didn’t always have an easy road either. Black Swan auteur Darren Aronofsky came close to directing 2013’s The Wolverine (James Mangold stepped in), while this year’s success of Deadpool came about only after years of Fox refusing to green light the movie. And there was a whole discarded script for X-Men Origins: Magneto, by Up in the Air scribe Sheldon Turner, a prequel focusing on Erik Lensherr’s hunt for the Nazi doctor who experimented on him, and the formation of his friendship with Charles Xavier (the project was cancelled, but elements of it were repurposed in X-Men: First Class, with Turner getting a story credit).

And last year, we were seemingly only a month or two from the beginning of Gambit, which would have starred Channing Tatum as the popular card-throwing Cajun mutant. Director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) left the project, and it’s been delayed indefinitely while it gets retooled. Still, with plentiful sequels and spinoffs in development at Fox, it’s likely it won’t be the last X-Men project to hit a hurdle or two on the way to the multiplex.

‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ costar Alexandra Shipp takes us through the emotional roller coaster of shaving her head: