X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST writer and producer Simon Kinberg has been making the promotional rounds in place of director Bryan Singer. Speaking with Crave Online, Kinberg shed some light on the situation involving Anna Paquin’s Rogue in the film. While the majority of her sequence was cut, a previous report stated that she was back in the film as a cameo. So what’s the deal?
“We shot with Anna a big subplot in the movie,” says Kinberg on the sequence which finds Xavier, Magneto and Iceman rescuing Rogue from captivity. “We watched it in the movie and then we cut it out of the movie because, she’s great in it and it was well shot, it just didn’t fit the film. It was a subplot that I created sort of as an appendage to the movie because I wanted to do something else that didn’t serve the main plot of the film.
“I just wanted to see Ian and Patrick on a mission together,” he continues, “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.
“It was them meeting Rogue for something connected to the main plot of the future story of Days of Future Past, but truly I just contrived it. I created it in order to get them on a final mission together. I think people will see it at some point and they’ll probably like it in and of itself. It’s a perfectly fine 10 minutes of movie. It just, in a film that has two time periods, two types of robots, 10-12 main characters that you really want to service, the notion of doing a standalone broken out subplot just didn’t survive.”
Click here to read much more from the interview, including Kinberg expanding further on his regrets with Dark Phoenix in X-MEN: THE LAST STAND.
I HATE KINBERG’S EXCUSE SO MUCH. I can’t accept it. It feels like they sacrifice Rogue’s character for the others. Why they need to film and write that scene if they going to remove it in the final edit.
I think that’s Kinberg’s point.
It was a scene that shouldn’t have been written, let alone shot. That it was an indulgence on his part, which didn’t ultimately serve the picture. Thus it was cut.
Seems perfectly reasonable.
Yup, the sequence probably messed with the film’s pacing, veering off into a side plot at that point in the film. Also goes with Bryan saying “Through the editing process, the sequence became extraneous… But like many things in the editing process, it was an embarrassment of riches and it was just one of the things that had to go.”
Hopefully her brief time in the film is special.
I echo your hope. 🙂