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If the end of this summer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past made you wonder whether or not some of the previous movies even counted anymore, then executive producer and writer Simon Kinberg has an answer for you: Yes. Kind of.
“We certainly re-write some of the history of [X-Men: The Last Stand] and [X-Men: Origins — Wolverine],” Kinberg said in response to a fan question sent to Yahoo! Movies. “One of the things we talk about in Days of Future Past is that you can change the future, it’s like a stream that moves in one direction — you can create a new ripple in it, but you certainly don’t change the current. What we did in Days of Future Past changed some things, but like you see of the film, they end up back in the mansion in the future, so most of the current continued in the same direction, so most of the things you see in [the earlier films] still happened but with slight adjustments.”
Well, if you call “undoing the deaths of half of your main cast” a “slight” adjustment, then sure. For continuity-obsessed fans, considering X-Men: The Last Stand a bad dream that is best left ignored may be the most straightforward option in dealing with the movie, but when it comes to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (and, for that matter, The Wolverine, which also references events in The Last Stand which now didn’t happen), things get a little bit trickier. Blame it all on Wolverine’s faulty memory, perhaps.
Answering other questions from fans, Kinberg took responsibility for Anna Paquin’s subplot being cut from Days of Future Past, saying “In a movie that had a ton of plots and a ton of characters to service, the Rogue plot — as you will probably eventually see — was a subplot, it was a deviation from the main story of the movie, and as much as we loved it when we saw it, anything that took you away from the main spine, the main story of the film, we had to cut… If it’s anybody’s fault, it was mine, because I shouldn’t have written it that way, I should’ve integrated her into the main story.”
Kinberg also said that the next X-Men movie, X-Men: Apocalypse “really follows the stories of the, let’s say, First Class X-Men: Jen Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nick Hoult, and the others of that generation of X-Men.” Asked if characters from the original X-Men movies would need to be recast for future appearances, he said, “Are we gonna have to recast? If some of those characters were in the movie, we would, but we will see.”
X-Men: Apocalypse will be released May 18, 2016.
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