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The first X-Men movie, and by all metrics, the movie was a hit. Not only did it have one of the biggest opening weekends of all time, but the 20th Century Fox film also had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a superhero movie ever at that time. X-Men was a hit, and it clearly resonated with the audience.

However, if you were to assume that having a hit film led to increased sales for the comics, you would be mistaken. Despite popular belief, having a popular movie in theaters doesn’t always translate to increased readership.

X-Men officially premiered on July 14, 2000. According to Comichron, a website that tracks comic sales, Uncanny X-Men sold 120,672 copies in June 2000, a month before the film was released. In July, the month of the film’s premiere, Uncanny X-Men sold 116,652 copies, a decrease from the previous month. In August, after many people had seen the film, Uncanny X-Men’s readership had slipped to 109,829 copies.

“People are assuming that movies or TV shows will help the sales of a comic book,” Comichron creator John Jackson Miller tells Popverse. Miller has been a comics journalist for decades, and went on to be a comics an dprose writer, has spent years studying comic book sales data, and started Comichron to catalog his findings.  

In terms of movies helping comic book sales, Miller says the formula isn’t simple.

“It's not automatic. It is dependent on a number of things. One is, just very simply, how obvious is it that the property is a comic book. For example, you remember the Men in Black movies? That came from comics. But it wasn't something where it helped the comic series. All they really did was just an adaptation. It wasn't something where people looked at that and they knew that was what it was.”

Miller noted that it helps when retailers and the publisher have the ability to harness the success of the films and television shows, which isn’t always the case.

“Batman 1966, it was very easy for newsstands to promote the notion that, okay, here is that thing that's on TV. Three years later, Archie Comics would benefit from the same thing with its cartoon.”

Miller then referenced the 2000 X-Men movie, noting that it was released during a time when Marvel was having financial troubles.

“The other important things are what's going on in the comics industry at the moment. Do retailers have the resources, and do the publisher at the time have the resources to take advantage of a major hit? For example, the year 2000, when the X-Men movie came out. The first X-Men was not quite as easily connected to comic shops because the general public was not that familiar with the characters. But then also, 2000 is the bottom of a seven-year slide that followed after the early 1990s crash.”

“By that point, and I was reporting on it at the time, there were not a lot of shops that had gone deep on advertising X-Men or having lots of extra copies. I went to shops in my area and found one or two shelf copies of the series. It was not something where people did a big promotion for it. Fast forward two years later, and by that point, the market has turned around, because Marvel has had the Ultimate Comics that have come out. A variety of things are happening. It was also around the time of Transformers coming back. So, there's a lot of good things happening, and there's a lot of energy.”

“There's more money. In 2002 when the Spider-Man movie comes out, we have the very first Free Comic Book Day The next day, and that is the most effective sales tool that the comic shops collectively have really had in terms of getting people to focus on a single day. They put that day always right in the first of May, right when there's a comic book movie, and they were able to actually spend some money in many of the shops doing cross promotions at movie theaters. It just helps if you've got a cash flow that is going to make you be able to do that. You need the resources. There's no one solid answer to these things.”

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.