DAYS OF
FUTURE PAST.

A SEQUEL PLANNED WITH NO TIME TRAVEL AT ALL

HOW A STRAIGHT FIRST CLASS SEQUEL BECAME DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

Simon Kinberg has said the film began as something much smaller. After First Class, the plan was a conventional sequel in which the older cast appeared in stand-alone scenes that were not connected to the past, and in which, as he put it, “there wasn’t going to be any time travel.” The idea grew into an intercut structure Kinberg compared to The Godfather Part II, and from there into a full adaptation of the Days of Future Past comic storyline.

Matthew Vaughn, who had directed First Class, stepped back from directing the sequel. On 30 October 2012 it was confirmed that Bryan Singer, who had directed X-Men and X2, had closed a deal to direct, with Vaughn staying on as a producer alongside Kinberg and Lauren Shuler Donner. Kinberg described Singer’s approach to the material as fluid: the director stayed open to new ideas, whether they arrived a week before a scene was shot or on the day.

A 1981 COMIC, WITH ITS TIME TRAVELER REPLACED

WHY WOLVERINE GOES BACK INSTEAD OF KITTY PRYDE, AND WHAT THE FILM SET OUT TO FIX

The source is the Uncanny X-Men storyline by Chris Claremont and John Byrne that began in issue #141 in 1981, in which a dystopian future ruled by Sentinels sends a mind back to prevent it. In the comic, Kitty Pryde is the one who goes back. In the film it is Wolverine, and Kinberg’s reasons were practical. Kitty, he said, would have been “negative five years old in 1970,” which would have meant recasting her at close to Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s age, whereas Wolverine “is ageless, so he’d look the same as an actor in 1973 as he would in the future.” Chris Claremont visited the set and was supportive of the changes.

“I can right some of the wrongs we might have done in X3.”

Simon Kinberg, who co-wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, on what the time travel allowed

That is the film’s other reason to exist. By bringing the original and First Class casts together, with Hugh Jackman as the overlap, it gave Kinberg, who had co-written The Last Stand, a way to revisit that film’s events rather than leave them as they were.

A SCENE DESIGNED LATE IN THE GAME, AND TWO ERAS OF ROBOTS

HOW THE QUICKSILVER KITCHEN SEQUENCE AND THE SENTINELS WERE BUILT

Early drafts had Juggernaut break Magneto out of the Pentagon. Kinberg said that swapping him for a new character was among Singer’s first notes, because Juggernaut’s powers had been “exhausted, visually” in The Last Stand. Editor John Ottman said the replacement, Evan Peters’s Quicksilver sequence, was designed “way, way late in the game” through previsualization, with its slow-motion material filmed on the last two days of the shoot.

The effect rests on what Kinberg called “super, super high speed photography,” not on effects alone. Peters’s stunt double could run sideways along a wall for only a couple of seconds at a time, and editing stretched that to much longer. Visual effects supervisor Richard Stammers credited Rising Sun Pictures with 29 shots on the sequence. Ottman acknowledged that the Fox team knew Marvel Studios had its own Quicksilver coming in Avengers: Age of Ultron, and that they aimed to “preemptively outdo whatever they were planning.”

Stammers described two Sentinels. The 1973 model is an early prototype made of “space age polymers” so that it could be “Magneto proof,” with Legacy FX building an 18-foot practical version for the set and Digital Domain creating the CG version. The future Sentinels, designed at MPC, carry the DNA of Mystique and transform with scale-like effects. Peter Dinklage plays Bolivar Trask, whose program builds them. Digital Domain handled the destruction of RFK Stadium and the White House, and the shoot was based in Montreal with an additional aerial plate unit in Washington. Stammers counted 1,311 effects shots from 12 vendors.

A CUT SUBPLOT, RESTORED ONE SUMMER LATER

WHAT THE ROGUE CUT PUT BACK, AND WHO WAS CHANTING AT THE END

Anna Paquin’s Rogue was cut from the theatrical release, and the Rogue Cut reached Blu-ray on 14 July 2015 with about seventeen minutes of new material, running 149 minutes. The largest addition is a subplot in which Rogue is held captive in the dystopian future, along with a final mission for the older Xavier and Magneto, a moment between Beast and Mystique, and expanded roles for Blink and Bishop. It is not technically a director’s cut, and both versions are on the disc.

The post-credits scene jumps to ancient Egypt. A crowd chants “En Sabah Nur” while a hooded figure appears to build the pyramids, and the camera reveals a young boy. En Sabah Nur is the birth name of the comics villain Apocalypse, and Fox had already dated X-Men: Apocalypse for 27 May 2016 with Singer attached to direct.

THE REWATCH

A WORLDWIDE FRANCHISE RECORD, AND REVIEWS TO MATCH

X-Men: Days of Future Past opened to $90.8 million over its three days in the US, behind The Last Stand’s $102.8 million, and finished with $233.9 million in the US and $746.0 million worldwide. That made it the series’ highest-grossing film at the time, well ahead of The Last Stand’s $460.4 million worldwide, though its domestic total fell just short of that film’s $234.4 million. Rotten Tomatoes lists a 90% critics’ score from 331 reviews, and its consensus says the film “ranks among the franchise’s finest installments.” Metacritic’s Metascore is 75 from 44 critic reviews.

For a first watch, X-Men: Days of Future Past sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide directly after The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and in the X-Men movies in order guide directly after The Wolverine, with Deadpool next on that route.