The 2000 X-Men film spent nearly a decade in development hell. Marvel and writers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas drafted a screenplay in 1984, but it stalled when the studio that held the rights ran into financial trouble. Carolco Pictures then talked to Stan Lee and Chris Claremont about a version with James Cameron producing and Kathryn Bigelow directing, but that collapsed when Carolco went bankrupt. Twentieth Century Fox eventually bought the rights in 1994 after the animated series succeeded, and went through many writers and directors before Bryan Singer took over. Along the way, Singer and his team cut a Danger Room and a range of characters to get the budget approved, and the story was reshaped around the civil rights parallels between Xavier and Martin Luther King Jr., and Magneto and Malcolm X.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.