Matthew Vaughn's X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST Would Have Recast Wolverine
I thought Bryan Singer's X-Men: Days of Future Past was the best X-Men movie yet, but for those of you who were looking for something a little bit different, here's some fuel for your imagination. X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn wanted to direct Days of Future Past, but ended up making Kingsman: The Secret Service instead. (I think that decision resulted in the best possible scenario for fans, but that's just me.) And even though Hugh Jackman has played Logan/Wolverine in all of the X-films so far, Vaughn had a treatment worked out in which Jackman would have been in the same movie as a younger version of Wolverine. The director told MTV:
“I had a whole different idea of how X-Men should go. I thought Days of Future Past should be the next one and it’d be set in the ’80s. So, when I wrote the treatment, I then wrote Kingsman and got confused about which film I should direct next. I said to Fox, ‘Let me do Kingsman now, get somebody else in and we’ll do the ’70s version, recast Wolverine, and then we do Days of Future Past with the new Wolverine and Hugh [Jackman], and make it the biggest spectacle we’ve ever seen.”
“That was my idea but Fox, quite rightly so, I mean, you know, they’ve got a bottom line to look after and went ‘no, we’re doing it.” And Bryan [Singer], it’s Bryan’s franchise. I think he proved it’s his by knocking it out of the park.”
Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: Days of Future Past will forever be one of those geek properties that people look back on and wonder about, like Guillermo del Toro's The Hobbit or J.J. Abrams' Superman: Flyby. Like I said, though, I'm happy with the version of Days of Future Past that Singer created. Still, it raises an interesting point about the longevity of Hugh Jackman's run as Wolverine. Right now, I believe he's lined up to appear in X-Men: Apocalypse and then Wolverine 3 for James Mangold, and that might be the end of his time as the character. Vaughn's version would have at least eased audiences into the idea of a new actor eventually replacing Jackman, and the timing might have worked out well by blending the new actor in with the younger cast from the films and carrying the story forward from there. We also might have gotten a version of the movie that stayed closer to its comic source material, with Kitty Pryde being the one who time-traveled, not Wolverine. But now we'll never know.
Vaughn has been kicking around ideas for a Kingsmen sequel, a Hit-Girl prequel, and even Kick-Ass 3, so hopefully we get a chance to see one of those from him sometime soon. (My vote is for a Kingsmen sequel.)