The current incarnation of the X-Men franchise has finally come to an end with Dark Phoenix. And while this final entry hasn’t been particularly warmly received, it’s good to remember that it’s kind of amazing that we ever even got this far in the first place.

After almost 20 years and eleven installments, it’s becoming hard to envision a world before X-Men movies. But getting the X-Men from the page to the screen for the first time took years, and there were a number of potential X-Men films from notable Hollywood talent that stalled before making it to production. Then there are projects like X-Men Origins: Magneto (which became something else entirely), Deadpool (which was long dead before we finally got it), and Gambit (which is starting to look like it might never get made).

This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive or exhaustive listing of every unproduced X-Men screenplay. Instead, I’ve focused on a series of drafts that had the best chance of getting made. Not included are re-writes of existing X-Men films (like Joss Whedon’s discarded overhaul of the first X-Men movie and other early drafts that essentially just became the first film) and only slightly different drafts of movies that got made with some changes (David Benioff and Skip Woods’ Deadpool-less X-Men Origins: Wolverine for example).

Mostly, though, I only thought it fair to write about ones I’ve actually read. If you have others, please get in touch…