‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ has been the most successful movie in the film franchise and was almost universally embraced by fans, who were turned off by earlier efforts like ‘X-Men: Last Stand’ and ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine.’  In a surprising twist, a lot of things that fans hated about those two movies were undone, thanks to the magic of time travel.

Writer Simon Kinberg spoke about those changes and attempted to clarify how Wolverine’s time traveling exploit impacted those existing movies:

“We certainly re-write some of the history of [X-Men: The Last Stand] and [X-Men: Origins — Wolverine].  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.”

To be honest, would anyone really be upset if the events of those films were simply wiped out?  James Marsden’s Cyclops was killed off in a piss-y move because the actor accepted a role in rival DC’s ‘Superman Returns.’ Many others were outraged by the death of Professor X and the de-powering of Magneto.  And Rogue’s voluntary de-powering flew in the face of the very concept of the X-Men.  Jean Grey’s death was inspired by actual comic book events, but it was still nice to see Famke Jensen back in the role.

Speaking of Rogue, Anna Paquin did make a quick cameo in ‘Days of Future Past’ but she was supposed to have a longer scene set in the bleak future setting.  The sequence was actually shot, but cut from the finished version of the film.

Kinberg stated:

“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.”

Sounds like the scene at least has a chance to resurface on DVD/BluRay.

How do you feel?  Is it cool that ‘Days of Future Past’ negated some of the events in previous films?  Or should they respect what’s come before and leave things alone?

Source: The Hollywood Reporter