X-Men: First Class (stylized on-screen as X: First Class) is a 2011 British-American superhero film based on the X-Men characters appearing in Marvel Comics. The fifth installment in the X-Men film series, it was directed by Matthew Vaughn and produced by Bryan Singer, and stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Rose Byrne, January Jones, Oliver Platt, and Kevin Bacon. At the time of its release, it was intended to be a franchise reboot and contradicted the events of X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009); however, the follow-up film X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) retconned First Class into a prequel to X-Men (2000). First Class is set primarily in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and focuses on the relationship between Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr / Magneto, and the origin of their groups—the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants, respectively, as they deal with the Hellfire Club led by Sebastian Shaw, a mutant supremacist bent on enacting nuclear war.
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