Editorial Staff
“X-Men : Days of Future Past” screenwriter Simon Kinberg says he wrote the film’s final scenes to serve as somewhat of a final goodbye to the cast of the ‘original’ “X-Men” movies. He’s said it before, and would be happy to be proven wrong, but the scribe thinks it unlikely we’ll see the cast of that original trilogy – especially Patrick Stewart’s incarnation of Professor Charles Xavier – together again.
“We approached it as a final goodbye for the original actors. But to be totally candid, that’s the way I approached X-Men: The Last Stand,” Kinberg tells The Hollywood Reporter. “If you talked to me in 2006 and said, ‘Do you think we’ll ever see Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier again? Do you think we’ll see Ian and Halle [Berry] and Ellen Page and Shawn Ashmore back on screen together?’ I most likely would have said no, and certainly in the case of Patrick Stewart I would have said no way.”
Noting that the final scene sins in the film serve as a goodbye to the original mutant troupe, Kinberg says “There’s some part of our brains that hopes we will see them again, but we wanted to tell a story that felt like it was a conclusion to their stories.”
“I really wanted to have a feeling of resolution at the end for the old Charles and Eric”, Kinberg says of the characters played by Stewart and Ian McKellan. “Thematically our movie is — if we knew when we were younger what we know now, maybe we wouldn’t have made the same mistakes. Ian [McKellen] and Patrick in real life are best, best friends. They don’t have a lot of screen time together in Days of Future Past, but I think there is some of their real affection that you feel in their scenes together. That line wrote itself.”
But just because the group as one likely won’t reunite for any more “X-Men” movies doesn’t mean some of the gang won’t pop up here and there.
“The notion was always that at the end of the movie we return to the mansion and the school and the X-Men we met in X 1, but with some modification, because history has been changed. As much as there is a happy return at the end of Days of Future Past, not every character is accounted for. There is still opportunity for mystery about what happened to some of them. We definitely wanted to feel that we as filmmakers and the characters themselves had done enough good to justify a happier future.”
The next “X-Men” film, “X-Men : Apocalypse” will reportedly features the cast of “X-Men : First Class” – James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence et al, but there have been rumours suggesting Wolverine might also make a reappearance.
Kinberg is now busy writing the “Fantastic Four” reboot for Fox. Does he think we might see – since the characters are both housed at the same studio – a crossover one day between the X-Men and the Fantastic Four characters?
“In the world of Marvel Studios and everything they’re doing that we’ve been inspired by, anything is possible. I would say purely as a fan of comics and these film franchises, I would love to see it, but it has challenges. The Fantastic Four live in a world where they are fantastic because they are the only people who have super powers. If they were to live in a world full of mutants, they would kind of just be four more mutants. In the X-Men movies, we have never acknowledged a public team of superheroes called the Fantastic Four who live in New York City, even though Charles’ mansion is in Westchester, not so far form the city.”
