The real game changer would come in 2000. Marvel and its various partners had been trying to adapt its most successful print property, the X-Men, into film for nearly two decades. Comic writer Chris Claremont had written an outline in 1982, and Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas had taken a crack at a screenplay in 1984 for Orion Pictures. Like so many proposed adaptations before them, they simply sat in a drawer.
