Trivia: Matthew Vaughn Would Have Cast A New Wolverine For 'Days Of Future Past'
After making X-Men: First Class, co-writer and director Matthew Vaughn teased that his sequel to that mutant movie might entail some political intrigue, with Magneto controlling the bullet that killed JFK. We know how that worked out in the film that became X-Men: Days of Future Past. Vaughn eventually moved on to make Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Now that he's promoting that film Vaughn is talking about some ideas he had for his version of the X-Men sequel. One involved both another film in-between First Class and Days of Future Past, and eventually recasting Wolverine, choosing a new, younger actor in order to take the series into the future.
Vaughn spoke to MTV, and explained that the story outline he wrote after First Class also featured Wolverine, just like the final version of Days of Future Past did. It was just not the Wolverine we know — or at least not only the one we know.
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's an interesting concept; essentially we could have had another movie in between First Class and Days of Future Past, and then pushed forward to a point where a new actor for Wolverine could have been hired, with whom the series could continue moving through the '80s and '90s.
Vaughn also says,
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.
You might also wonder if this was part of an idea to just get out of the series altogether. Propose an idea he knew the brass wouldn't accept, especially with respect to accelerating the departure of Jackman from the Wolverine role, and in so doing have a semi-graceful path out, to Kingsman.
Jackman, of course, isn't done yet. He's doing another solo Wolverine movie, perhaps with Patrick Stewart once again reprising the Charles Xavier role, and Jackman will also appear in X-Men: Apocalypse, which shoots in April of this year for release on May 27, 2016.