Not only is Bryan Singer, the acclaimed director of ‘X-Men’ and ‘X-Men 2’ (y’know the good ones), back in the franchise directing ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ (the “inbetweequel” bridging the ‘First Cast’ storyline (and cast) with that of the original trilogy), but he’s bringing some old friends along for the ride. Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine plays a central role, as do Patrick Stewart’s Professor X and Ian McKellan’s Magneto. They aren’t the only ones reprising their roles in this new movie. Halle Berry, despite being pregnant at the time, is back as weather controlling Storm, Shawn Ashmore is once again flinging icicles as Iceman, Daniel Cudmore returns as steel strongman Colossus, Ellen Page returns as Kitty Pryde and of course Anna Paquin is back as power absorbing Rogue.
Or not. It was previously announced that Paquin’s scene as Rogue was cut from the finished film. She would have factored into a sequence where McKellan’s Magneto and Stewart’s Professor X would have gone on a mission to free Rogue from captivity. The scene would presumably have answered some questions left over from ‘X-Men 3: The Last Stand’ in which she voluntarily gave up her powers in order to be able to touch another person without harming them.
Paquin is one of the bigger names among the cast. She won an Academy Award for her role in ‘The Piano’ and has headlined HBO’s hit series ‘True Blood‘ which is entering its seventh season in June. And her image continues to pop up on promotional material, including the ‘Empire’ magazine cover pictured.
Executive Producer Simon Kinberg attempted to shed some light on this action.
“I just wanted to see Ian [McKellan] and Patrick [Stewart] on a mission together. So I took them away from the main plot of the movie so that they could go off and do something, and [Rogue] was the MacGuffin of that mission. It was a perfectly fine 10 minutes of the film that didn’t fit the film. So we pulled her out of the movie and pulled that plot out of the film. I can’t speak to any other rumors about any other way she could appear in the film, but I can tell you that the main plot that we shot with her, we pulled out of the movie.”
Rumor has it that due to fan backlash, Paquin was added back into the movie in a more limited fashion, but Kinberg’s statement doesn’t seem to indicate that at all. If Paquin only filmed one scene, will they re-cut it to fit another scene?
Kinberg also addressed Rogue’s treatment in ‘The Last Stand’:
“No, I have plenty of residual guilt from The Last Stand and this movie in many ways was like my chance to tell a better X-Men story. Though I’m very proud of what we did with X-Men: First Class but the two biggest stories for me growing up were Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past. Those were the ones that I loved, so what I wanted to do with Dark Phoenix is different [than] what the movie ended up being. That’s a whole other interview and conversation, but on this one we had a lot more creative freedom and more encouragement to be loyal to the original books. At any rate, it wasn’t that. [The first draft] was just much more the Dark Phoenix story. What happened when we were developing X3 was it began as the Dark Phoenix story and then it evolved into combining also the cure plot. At a certain point in the development process or pre-production process, the cure plot took precedence over the Dark Phoenix plot. So what should have been Dark Phoenix A story, cure plot B story started to invert, I think partly because the other actors like Ian and Patrick were more related to that other story.”
Will Rogue ever get the redemption she deserves? We’ll have to wait a few more weeks until ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ hist theaters on may 23rd.
What do you think? Are you hoping to see Anna Paquin return even in just a brief cameo? Comment below!
Source: Comic Book Movie
