Matthew Vaughn isn’t exactly twiddling his thumbs waiting for his next big film project while currently working on his third Kingsman movie, he has recently spoken about his history with the X-Men franchise, notably the trilogy he was poised to helm starting with his critically successful X-Men: First Class in 2011.
Although originally attached to 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand before eventually backing out, X-Men: First Class was the first, and thus far, only X-Men movie Vaughn has worked on having decided to once again back out of 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past causing returning director and original visionary Bryan Singer to step back in.
However, Vaughn has revealed that he originally intended to introduce an X-Men movie in between 2011’s First Class and 2014’s Days of Future Past.
Giving a reason as to why fans had never heard anything about this mystery movie prior to now, Vaughn explained that Fox’s decision to make X-Men: Days of Future Past a direct sequel to X-Men: First Class was one of the reasons why Vaughn back out of the franchise.
With the plot being that this new movie would have focussed on a new younger Wolverine and his interactions with the characters he reintroduced from X-Men: First Class, Vaughn made it clear that Days of Future Past would have still happened but would have been his third in the franchise to both wrap up his trilogy and see it end with the climax of seeing the culmination of characters from the original trilogy and Vaughn’s First Class trilogy.
The decision was made to go ahead with Days of Future Past as the sequel to First Class once Fox read Vaughn’s script and loved it so much, they wanted to fast-track it. Thus resulting in the likes of Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halle Berry making their X-Men movie return one movie earlier than originally planned.
Fox’s reasoning to defend their decision was to say that while X-Men: First Class was both a critical and box office modest success with just under $146.5million worldwide, it is still the second-lowest grossing movie in the franchise just $16.5million ahead of 2013’s The Wolverine, which incidentally was the X-Men movie in-between First Class and Days of Future Past.
Meanwhile, despite the critical and fan response to the 2006 X-Men: The Last Stand, the movie is still the highest grossing X-Men movie outside of the Deadpool movies and third-highest grossing worldwide with $234.3million.
Fox gathered from these numbers that fans wanted to see the original cast return as soon as possible and this, along with the potential of the script, made the studio want to push forward with the crossover movie.
Vaughn’s younger Wolverine movie was reportedly hoping to approach Tom Hardy to portray the adamantium-clawed Mutant, a role which has become synonymous with Hugh Jackman since the movie franchise began in 2000. Hardy later went on to star as Eddie Brock in Sony’s 2018 Venom.
While fans will most likely never see Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men trilogy as intended, the X-Men movies as we know them are about to be wrapped up with X-Men: Dark Phoenix hitting theatres next week.
Dark Phoenix stars Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Evan Peters, Alexandra Shipp, Tye Sheridan, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jessica Chastain.
Would you have wanted a younger Wolverine movie directed by Matthew Vaughn?
