Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, also known as Magneto, is a character primarily portrayed by Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender in 20th Century Fox's X-Men film series.

As in the comics, Magneto is depicted as a powerful mutant, a subspecies of humans born with superhuman abilities, who can manipulate and generate magnetic fields.

[P 2] After escaping the horrors of Nazi Germany, the young Erik Lehnsherr emigrates to the United States at some point, arriving at Ellis Island.

Lehnsherr and Xavier track down other mutants, Havok, Banshee, Darwin and Angel Salvadore until they have a team ready to challenge Shaw.

He then addresses his team and Shaw's compatriots as his mutant brothers and sisters, using the missiles sent out by Soviet and American battleships now working together, turning them against the fleet.

[P 2] After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Erik Lehnsherr is captured by the government and imprisoned in a prison made of concrete beneath The Pentagon.

[P 5] Some time before the events of X-Men (2000), Magneto discovers that Hans von Shank, a Nazi war criminal whom he recognizes as one of his chief tormentors in Auschwitz, is still alive and imprisoned; he breaks into the old man's prison cell to kill him, but Xavier shows up and talks him out of it.

[P 1] In the sequel X2 (2003), Magneto is still a prisoner and is forced by the mutant-hating colonel and military scientist William Stryker to tell what he knows about Cerebro and Xavier's operations.

Magneto then uproots the Golden Gate Bridge, taking the battle to the Worthington facility on Alcatraz Island, but ends up being depowered when Beast injects him with the serum.

[P 4] In 1973, a time-travelling Logan convinces Hank McCoy and the young Charles Xavier to break Lehnsherr out of his prison made of concrete and sand beneath The Pentagon as part of an effort to avert a dark future.

Tracking down the location of the eight Sentinel robot prototypes (made out of a non-magnetic "space-age polymer"), he infuses them with iron to be able to control them, and then heads to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, uprooting the stadium with his magnetic powers and transporting it to the White House while triggering the Sentinels to start firing wildly and securing the surroundings for him.

President Richard Nixon along with Trask, William Stryker and Secret Service men takes shelter in the White House Bunker, but Magneto brings it to the ground level and rips loose its door.

He then makes a speech to the whole world where he warns it about the consequences of trying to challenge the mutants, declaring that mutant-kind is the future and will inherit the Earth from humanity.

He intends to kill Nixon as a final warning, but the "president" is in fact Raven, who shoots Magneto with Stryker's non-magnetic gun and knocks him out.

Worried, Lehnsherr returns home only to find the authorities waiting for him with non-magnetic weapons, having taken Magda and Nina hostage to convince "Gurzsky" to turn himself in to the Interpol.

Tearfully, Lehnsherr takes his daughter's metal necklace off her lifeless body and uses it to slaughter all the men, and then returns to the steel mill to kill his "co-workers" for selling him out.

However, En Sabah Nur suddenly appears out of a portal, kills the men himself and then explains that he was the world's first mutant and has now been reawakened after millennia of being trapped beneath a pyramid in Egypt.

They then head to Auschwitz where Erik Lehnsherr once suffered; En Sabah Nur enhances Magneto's powers and persuades him to raze this place of terror to the ground to rid himself of the shadows of the past.

Under his new mentor's influence, the embittered Magneto starts to distort Earth's magnetic field, threatening the collapse of human civilization.

[P 9] In the film Logan (2017), inspired by Old Man Logan and set in the year 2029 seemingly in a separate timeline,[P 10] Magneto is not mentioned and is, along with nearly all other known mutants save for Wolverine and Charles Xavier, assumed to be dead, likely wiped out by anti-mutagenic substances added to many types of food which deprives mutants of their powers and make them sick while also disabling all newborn babies from being born with X-factor genes.

[4] Initially "unstable" due to her bipolar disorder,[5][6] the first season follows Polaris while pregnant, as she struggles with whether to "accept the mantle of her birthright, [whether] it [is] her job to be Magneto in his absence?

Magneto is vastly rewritten to be an anti-mutant industrialist with magnetic superpowers named Thomas Prince, who recruits Jason Wyngarde from the X-Men and uses him to frame them for murder.

In a 1995 treatment also called Wolverine and the X-Men, written by Laeta Kalogridis, Magneto intends to use the Legacy Virus to wipe out humanity.

[10] Turner was allegedly allowed to look through various back issues of Marvel Comics and select a character he thought had potential for a cinematic origin story; he decided upon Magneto.

[13] Before Ian McKellen was cast for the 2000 film, Christopher Lee,[14] Terence Stamp[15] and David Hemblen (who voiced Magneto for the 1992-1997 animated series)[16] were considered for the role.

[17] Actors who auditioned for the younger Magneto in the prequels include Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Andrew Garfield, Jack Huston, Eddie Redmayne and Frank Dillane.

In the books, Quicksilver / Peter Maximoff has a twin sister named Wanda, also called Scarlet Witch; for a long period of time they were considered to be Magneto's children.

Singer had said about Peter's unnamed sister in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The role of Sebastian Shaw in Magneto's backstory in X-Men: First Class is unique to this film, while Mystique barely had any association with Magneto in the comics, but is his most trusted henchwoman in the 2000-2006 trilogy and has a complicated relationship with him in the prequel films.

The Fassbender version of Magneto has been cited, alongside Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight, as one of the inspirations Michael B. Jordan had to play N'Jadaka / Erik "Killmonger" Stevens in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Black Panther, feeling that Fassbender's portrayal motivated him to deliver an awesome performance as a comic book movie villain.