The X-Men movies spent years creating iconic characters and the many villains that challenged them. From Magneto to Apocalypse, they faced some of the most powerful entities in the Marvel Universe. However, Mutants weren't the only threat to the team, as humans also formed a considerable opposition. But even though Senator Kelly was the main Mutant antagonist in 2000's X-Men, Henry Gyrich was just as, if not more, dangerous.

In the movie, Gyrich only appeared alongside Senator Kelly and shared the same disdain he had for Mutants. However, it was revealed on a helicopter that Gyrich was Mystique in disguise. Following a now iconic demonstration of Mystique's shape-shifting abilities, it's confirmed that Gyrich was replaced in a plan to kidnap Senator Kelly and test a machine on him that would turn him into a Mutant. However, Gyrich's fate was relegated to a news report, where it's explained his body was mauled by a bear, though fans already knew it was Sabretooth who killed him. But Gyrich's forgettable death was, more than anything, a waste of a great villain that hindered the larger X-Men movie universe.

Updated by Robert Vaux on July 8, 2024: The Fox X-Men Universe may have made some notable changes to the source material, but it did adapt many elements from the comic books. This included side characters such as Henry Gyrich, though he didn't last long in the movie series. His presence in the films, however, showed how much he had become a part of X-Men lore in the comics, with the character no longer tied to another mighty Marvel team. The movies have addressed some of the overarching themes he represents, but that hasn't changed the casual way he was discarded in the original film. The article has been updated with new information about human villains in the X-Men comics, and the ways that superhero movies in general treated their baddies back when the first X-Men films were released. The formatting has been updated to reflect CBR's current guidelines.

Who Was Henry Gyrich In The X-Men Comics?

Henry Gyrich was a career-driven man who sought to do anything and everything to protect the interests of the United States in the comics. This led him to oversee the operations of The Avengers as he investigated them, with the team gaining certain privileges to continue operating. That said, over time, he began to instill certain measures that hindered the team's operation and forced Captain America and others to argue for their freedoms to be restored. In doing so, Gyrich lost his position, which led him to his most impactful and deadly contribution to the world.

Following his time with The Avengers, Gyrich was transferred to Project Wideawake, a secret operation that would eventually lead to the creation of the Sentinels. Those same creations would remain a huge problem for the growing Mutant population as they persecuted and even killed many Mutants over the years. While Gyrich wasn't one of the creators of said robots, his contributions resulted in their success, making him just as responsible for what came after as the Sentinel's real creator, Bolivar Trask. Since then, he's continued to appear throughout the Marvel Universe and wage war against superhumans, with the contentious Civil War II storyline being one of his most recent appearances.

Gyrich Represented the X-Men's Most Terrifying Adversaries

The fact that Henry Gyrich became an X-Men character more so than someone tied to the Avengers says a lot about the publication history of Marvel Comics. Though the Avengers were touted as Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the property as a whole was far from Marvel's most popular. They were already largely eclipsed by the popularity of the Fantastic Four, who at the time were actually prominent sellers for Marvel.

Likewise, the Chris Claremont run on Uncanny X-Men catapulted Marvel's merry mutants into the stratosphere of success. The X-Men easily eclipsed the Avengers in terms of relevance, with Spider-Man and the X-Men becoming Marvel's main brands. On top of that, their themes of mutant oppression meant that it made more sense for a government stooge to hound them than the comparatively "whitebread" Avengers such as Captain America.

Indeed, the X-Men comics make a point out of containing a number of adversaries who possess no special powers but prove a threat because of the hate they instill. In addition to Gyrich, their ranks include a number of the team's long-standing foes, such as William Stryker, Bolivar Trask, Cameron Hodge, and Senator Kelly, who also appears in the X-Men movies. Like Gyrich, he's killed off, but X2: X-Men United centered on a version of Stryker who has become a recurring villain in the franchise's Byzantine timeline. Similarly, the villains in 2017's Logan are humans who quietly engineered the extinction of mutantkind, rather than super-powered antagonists like Magneto or Sebastian Shaw.

Killing Gyrich Early Hindered The X-Men Franchise

Henry Gyrich played a small but integral role in the history of the Mutant population and one that should never have been glossed over in the movies. He was briefly seen talking with Senator Kelly and on a plane with him, though the latter time revealed that this was actually the shapeshifting mutant Mystique in disguise. The real Henry Gyrich had been killed by the Brotherhood of Mutants, ending any relevance the character may have had right out the gate. Killing him so early ultimately hindered the growth of the universe as well, since it wasn't until X-Men: The Last Stand that Sentinels were even teased in the Danger Room. Had he been kept alive, it's possible they could've come much sooner as retaliation for Senator Kelly's death and the attack Magneto conducted.

To compare, the alternate timeline of X-Men: Days of Future Past had Sentinels appear back in the 1970s and reach their full potential by at least 2024. Though not confirmed, it could be assumed that Henry Gyrich wasn't killed in this timeline, allowing him to oversee Project Wideawake in later stages and push for Sentinels to grow further and much more quickly. In the end, 2000's X-Men did much to grow comic book movies and its own universe. If the series had kept Henry Gyrich alive rather than killing him, it could've brought greater change to the franchise much sooner.

The general themes of Fox's X-Men movies also meant that Henry Gyrich had more potential relevance than ever. Both he and Senator Robert Kelly represented the political nature of X-Men storylines, with the mutants fighting for peace and tranquility in a world that fears and hates them. Those stories and the Fox movies in particular eschewed the more generic superhero trappings to tap into hard-hitting sci-fi allegories. This involved government bodies and other types of "villainy" attacking the mutants, creating enemies that the X-Men simply couldn't punch away. These elements appeared throughout the X-Men movies, so it's a shame that Henry Gyrich wasn't around for too long to impact them.

Killing off villains was hardly uncommon for superhero movies when the first X-Men was released. The tradition went back to Tim Burton's two Batman films, which infamously killed off The Joker, The Penguin, and Catwoman in short order. The trend continued past the first few X-Men movies, with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy adopting Burton's tactic of murdering many of his hero's most beloved baddies. (Spider-Man: No Way Home provided a slight ret-con by giving at least some version of them a happier ending.)

From that perspective, both Gyrich's death and Kelly's reflect the cinematic trends of the time. Time has proven such decisions short-sighted — essentially denying future films the storytelling potential of terrific characters — and as the genre has developed, the tradition was mercifully laid to rest. More recent efforts (notably the Marvel Cinematic Universe) have taken greater care to preserve figures with storytelling potential and kill off villains sparingly at most.

How The MCU Might Use Henry Gyrich

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is only now introducing mutants, and it's doing so slowly. Nevertheless, the plan now is to pivot to Marvel Studios' biggest and strongest brands, with the desire for the X-Men making them among that number. Thus, the X-Men will likely become the prevailing focus of the MCU as the largely failed Multiverse Saga. The way to truly set this up is to have the governments of the world note the rising population of mutants and attempt to do something to control them. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce both Senator Kelly and Henry Gyrich, using them to become political enemies of the rising species.

Once again, this can give the MCU a villain that can't simply be beaten up or thrown in jail. This would give him the ideological depth of someone like Killmonger, but with the added caveat that the X-Men would only make themselves look worse by opposing him. That's the kind of depth that the Marvel Cinematic Universe desperately needs to get back to, with grounded storytelling and less bombastic, grandiose stakes clearly being what audiences are looking for.

Not only have the more fantastical recent MCU movies left audiences cold, but the somewhat lower stakes of darker superhero programming such as Amazon Prime Video's The Boys has come back in style. Using Henry Gyrich to deliver those stories is key to making the mutants a strong, well-written allegory in the MCU, all while keeping him alive and refraining from making the same mistakes as the Fox movies.

X-Men can be streamed on Disney+.