IGN’s latest installment of Watch From Home Theater focused on what is widely regarded as one of the best movies in Fox’s long-running X-Men movie universe – Days of Future Past. Writer/producer Simon Kinberg stopped by to reflect on the movie and how it tackled an iconic comic book storyline. He even revealed new, hidden details about the movie and how it connects to other chapters of the X-Men saga.
If you missed out on the livestream, you can still watch it in the video embed above. But if you just want the juiciest details revealed during the stream, we’ve got you covered. We’ve already focused on Kinberg’s surprise reveal that Mister Sinister was meant to have appeared in Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie. Now read on for other insider reveals, including the fate of a missing X-Man and whether or not we’ll ever see a Kinberg Cut of Dark Phoenix.
Will Dark Phoenix Have a Kinberg Cut?
It’s only been a week since WB confirmed Justice League: The Snyder Cut will be debuting on HBO Max in 2021, and already that news seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box in Hollywood. Fans are wondering if other director’s cuts of popular but critically reviled blockbusters could materialize. Suicide Squad director David Ayer is already campaigning for an “Ayer Cut,” while Josh Trank has had to shoot down rumors of a “Trank Cut” of 2015’s Fantastic Four.
Given the frosty critical reception to 2019’s Dark Phoenix and the evidence the film’s plot was heavily changed during production, it’s certainly enough to wonder if we might eventually see a “Kinberg Cut” of that X-Men sequel. But according to Kinberg himself, that’s probably not going to happen. For one thing, it would require a lot of visual effects work on the scale of what’s reportedly being done with the Snyder Cut. And more importantly, he doesn’t feel that the theatrical cut substantially differs from his vision for the film.
“The movie they released was ultimately my vision for the film,” said Kinberg. “That vision did change over the span of making the movie. There are other scenes that we shot, just as there are a lot of other scenes in [Days of Future Past] that we shot and didn’t end up using. There were scenes we shot for that film and an ending that was quite different than the ending that was in the theatrical release. To release [a Kinberg Cut], it wouldn’t be just be like we splice those scenes back in, because those scenes were never completed because of visual effects and sound – all of the technical aspects that go into completing films of this scale. It would take a whole lot of work, but I appreciate the support.
Kinberg also told us that many of the changes to Dark Phoenix stemmed from Fox’s decision to condense the project from a duology into a single film. There’s no easy way to create a director’s cut more in line with his original story plans without going back and actually filming that canceled sequel.
Kinberg said, “With every movie, there are things you wish you did differently. On every movie there are things you thought were great and perfect, and then you watch them and didn’t think they were as strong as you imagined and you go a different way. Dark Phoenix was a hard movie because, in its initial concept when I wrote it, it was meant to be a two-part film. And then it suddenly became a one-part movie for reasons that weren’t of my doing. Having to create around that massive change was a challenge in itself. All these movies are uniquely challenging.”
Kinberg continued, “When you’re making a film as a writer, it’s never the same as when you conceived it. And when you make a film as a director, it’s never the same as what you shot. In that case it’s probably more significantly different. But ultimately, I was happy with the cut… that we shot and edited and completed.”
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The Fate of Banshee
2011’s X-Men: First of Class introduced a mostly new cast of mutant heroes and villains anchored around that core trinity of Professor X, Magneto and Mystique. Many of those new characters were written out of Days of Future Past, as viewers learned mutants like Angel and Azazel were casualties of Trask’s Sentinel program. But one character’s fate has never been revealed. Whatever became of Caleb Landry Jones’ Banshee?
Kinberg revealed that Banshee originally had a brief cameo in the Days of Future Past screenplay, one that would have answered that very question. Long story short – Banshee met a similarly dark fate after First Class.
“We had an idea about Banshee that we were going to use in the script. It was a sequence to show the power of the Sentinel. In the past, Trask, instead of doing the Powerpoint presentation he does later for his buyers, he was actually going to show a video of mutants being chased in the forest and being killed by one of his Sentinels. Banshee was going to be that mutant. That sequence got cut, and I couldn’t find another place to effectively insert him into the film and not just feel like we were sticking him into the film, because he’s a great actor and a cool character. I didn’t want to just give him a cameo.”
Time Travel in Two Marvel Universes
Fox’s X-Men movies may not take place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Days of Future Past and Avengers: Endgame share one important element in common. They’re both movies about heroes using time travel to try and undo a horrific global tragedy. But as Kinberg sees it, the two movies diverge in terms of how seriously they treat the rules of time travel.
He said, “What we did with the X-Men movies was try to create something that was a little more… I guess I would call it operatic or dramatic, even bordering on melodramatic, whereas the MCU movies are largely more fun and poppy and playful. Not that they don’t have their more serious moments, too, and obviously Endgame has some very serious moments. The way they handle time travel feels, to me, in line with the general tonality of their movies. Whereas this fit with the tone of what we do.”
Kinberg also revealed that no less an authority than Terminator 2 was a major influence on Days of Future Past. He relayed an anecdote about meeting director James Cameron during a 20th Century Fox panel and geeking out.
Kinberg said, “I knew James Cameron was going to be in this panel with me, so I had this handbook of Terminator 2 that I asked him to sign. I had brought it from Montreal so he could sign it. We’re backstage and I’m like, ‘I’m a huge fan of yours, and I’m doing this movie right now that’s a time travel movie – X-Men: Days of Future Past.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I know that movie.’ There are actually some similarities, and if you do some deep diving into the Internet… there are people who have conspiracy theories that some of the Days of Future Past comic inspired T2. Anyway, the whole point of it is, James Cameron writes in the book, ‘Dear Simon, Don’t f*** it up. Love, James.'”
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Fleshing Out Storm and Bishop
With such a massive ensemble cast and two different time periods to explore, it goes without saying that Days of Future Past isn’t able to give every single X-Man the attention they deserve. Kinberg singled out Halle Berry’s Storm and Omar Sy’s Bishop as two characters he wishes he’d been able to explore in greater depth.
“I wish we had more time to spend in the future,” said Kinberg. “In that, I would say the character that really springs to mind is Storm. Storm is… one of my favorites and doesn’t really have the same prominence in the movies that she has in the comics. In the future part of this film, we got Halle, who’s an extraordinary actress, and for most of the movie she’s kind of standing guard. Toward the end she has some battle sequences, but there’s not a lot of emotional character work we did with Storm in this movie. In truth, I wrote more. I wouldn’t say it was great, but I wrote more. We shot it with her and Bishop, Omar Sy, but it was a scene that was just her sort of talking about being ready for war and what war meant to them. It was a more philosophical scene than a character or emotional scene. In a movie that was two-and-a-half hours long, it dropped out of the film… This was really the younger generation’s film, in terms of the body of the movie.”
Kinberg continued, “I think I could have written that better, in truth. What I ended up writing was more two people talking about war as a concept, because they’re strangers. It’s hard to have an intimate conversation sometimes with a stranger you have no history with, whereas these other characters have so much dense history with each other… It’s harder to do with two people who are essentially strangers, whether they have similar or even entirely opposing viewpoints about war. In the case of Bishop and Storm, they had very similar viewpoints, but it just felt like a scene between two people who don’t have much emotional history agreeing on something. Which is not always the most dramatic, no matter how good the actors are.”
Making JFK a Mutant
One of the more interesting examples of Days of Future Past rewriting US history comes when we learn Magneto is implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The truth, as it turns out, is that Magneto was trying to save Kennedy from the bullet, because Kennedy himself was a mutant. And while that reveal is basically a throwaway line in the movie, Kinberg told us there was plenty of thought and debate surrounding its inclusion.
“We didn’t spend much time on it in the movie, but we definitely spent a lot of time thinking about it and talking about it,” he said. “One thing we talked about when I came up with the line was – is it insensitive? One of the things we do with this film and X-Men: First Class especially is we create this sort of hidden, buried history. It’s not an alternate history, because it still fits within our historical timeline.”
Unfortunately, even Kinberg doesn’t know what JFK’s mutant power might have been. “With JFK, I don’t know what his mutant power would be, but one thing we did talk about was that family was extraordinarily powerful. They are somewhat mysterious. A lot of tragic things have happened to that family in mysterious ways, so we felt like in a universe that is a comic book universe, if you were ever going to take a family that’s a real-life, historical family, it does feel like the Kennedys are the Wayne family. We took it somewhat seriously, but we didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of if JFK could fly or read minds.”
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A Hidden Rogue Easter Egg
Anna Paquin’s Rogue is another classic X-Man who doesn’t get much screen time in Days of Future Past. In fact, most of Paquin’s scenes were cut from the theatrical release, hence the extended “Rogue Cut” released on DVD. But Kinberg revealed Rogue is actually the source of a previously unknown Easter egg seen in the theatrical version.
“The pillars in [the X-Men’s hideout] are mirrored. We only realized very late that, in one of the mirrors we have, from the Rogue Cut, Rogue actually in the mirror instead of Kitty. It’s a really deep, deep cut unintentionally and completely accidentally. But we were like, ‘It’s taken us this long to notice it. We don’t think an audience is going to notice it.’ And no audience seems to have noticed it, or at least talked about it.”
Bringing Back the Original Cast
One IGN reader posed an intriguing question to Kinberg during the film’s emotional climax. If given the opportunity, how would Kinberg have continued the future timeline from Days of Future Past with the classic X-Men cast? While Kinberg said he had never considered the possibility before, he does feel it would be one way to tackle the Dark Phoenix Saga in a different and more comic book-accurate way from how it was handled in X-Men: The Last Stand.
He sad, “In the alternate universe he’s talking about, you could potentially – maybe not the next movie but the movie after that – because it would have been 10, 15 years after The Last Stand, you could do Dark Phoenix with Famke [Janssen]. You could do it with the Hellfire Club and with the screen time it necessitates, because it’s such a complex storyline. Probably you’d want a two-part movie. You’d want to bring the Hellfire Club in. You’d want it to be truly intergalactic. You’d want to bring in Lilandra. You’d want to really tell it that way, and I think you’d probably need at least one bridge movie between this and the beginning of that. The maturity of those actors and the history that goes back , which at that point would have been 25 years, could be interesting.”
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The X-Men in the MCU
With the X-Men franchise now in Disney’s hands and New Mutants most likely capping off a 20-year-old superhero universe, fans may be assuming Kinberg’s time with the X-men has come to an end. And while it remains to be seen if he’ll have any involvement with the rebooted X-Men line, Kinberg would certainly be interested in returning to the franchise in its new MCU setting.
Kinberg said, “Sure. I mean, I love the X-Men. They were my favorite comic growing up.. for a lot of reasons, wanting to fit in growing up and being a bit of an outcast as a young teen, X-Men really spoke to me. It’s something I’ve always loves. I’ve obviously dedicated a lot of my life, between X-Men movies and Logan and the Deadpool films. I’ve dedicated a whole lot of my life to it and could imagine doing it in a fresh new way. That would be exciting.”
When asked how he would choose to introduce mutants into the MCU, Kinberg said, “One of the things the MCU does so well, and I have such a profound respect as a fellow filmmaker and then as just a fan, is that they’re really loyal to the comics. They also are very unafraid f a more supernatural or science fiction tonality to their movies. They don’t feel like they need to ground them so much in a sort of physics-based reality. I think there’s something very great and liberating and spectacular about that. I think the X-Men could be very cool if you brought in science fiction elements and even the beyond Earth elements of the X-Men. That’s something as a fan I would love to see, because I don’t know that we’ve ever fully done that in a fully committed way in the Fox X-Men canon.”
Stay tuned to IGN to find out the next movie and celebrity guests in our Watch From Home Theater series.
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Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com X-Men: Is There a 'Kinberg Cut' of Dark Phoenix?