X-Men: First Class (2011) on Netflix
PG-1320112h 12mActionAdventureSci-Fi
In 1962, the CIA officer Moira MacTaggert finds mutants working with Sebastian Shaw and asks Charles Xavier for help. Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr and other recruits join a CIA team to stop Shaw.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.7/10773,745 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Auschwitz in 1944, the Nazi officer Klaus Schmidt watches the boy Erik Lehnsherr bend a metal gate with his mind after Erik is separated from his parents. In his office, Schmidt tells Erik to move a coin, and when Erik cannot, Schmidt kills Erik's mother. In New York, the telepath Charles Xavier meets Raven, a blue-skinned shapeshifter, and invites her to live in his home as his sister. By 1962, Erik is tracking Schmidt, now called Sebastian Shaw, while Charles earns a doctorate at Oxford.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about X-Men: First Class (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In December 2004 20th Century Fox hired screenwriter Sheldon Turner for an X-Men spin-off and he chose Magneto, pitching it as "The Pianist meets X-Men": set from 1939 to 1955, it followed Magneto surviving Auschwitz, meeting Xavier as a young soldier at the liberation, and hunting the Nazi war criminals who tortured him.
- Jekyll Island was chosen over Tybee Island after a producer looked at both on Google Earth and thought the water near Jekyll looked bluer. Palm trees planted in the sand to make it look tropical went brown or died within days in the cold, forcing significant digital color correction.
- Jennifer Lawrence went on a diet and worked out two hours daily to keep in shape, and Mystique's blue form meant an eight-hour make-up process like Romijn's on the other films; the first day in that make-up left blisters on Lawrence's upper body.
- Producers at first did not consider Matthew Vaughn because he had started on The Last Stand before backing out, but after seeing his satirical superhero film Kick-Ass, Kinberg contacted him. Vaughn thought Fox was joking about the chance to reboot X-Men, and accepted on learning it would be set in the 1960s.
- Broadway actor Benjamin Walker was cast as Beast but turned the role down to star in the Broadway musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson; Hoult took over and had to wear make-up that took four hours to apply, including a mask, contact lenses, a furry muscle suit and fake teeth.
- Vaughn discarded Shaw's look from the comics because he felt the villain would otherwise "look like an Austin Powers villain".
