Matthew Vaughn Reveals The X-Men Movie He Didn't Get To Make

If you're an in-demand enough director, you can afford to be choosy. At least that's the moral takeaway from a recent discussion with Kingsman: The Golden Circle and X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn, who shared his conception of the X-Men sequel he didn't get a chance to make in an interview with Uproxx. 

The director brought up his unused movie in the X-Men series as part of a discussion which touched on why the director hadn't chosen to do a sequel to one of his movies before Kingsman: The Golden Circle. If you recall, Vaughn's X-Men: First Class was followed up in 2014 with X-Men: Days of Future Past, which Vaughn was originally attached to direct. Instead, he left the project for the first Kingsman movie, leaving the X-Men sequel to be headed up by the movie series' returning original director, Bryan Singer.

"The reason I haven't done sequels in the past is they just weren't exciting me. And on Days of Future Past, even though I co-wrote the bloody thing, the reason I bailed out of it is two things," Vaughn said. The first reason was that he wanted to let Bryan Singer return to material he helped create while Vaughn went and started something on his own. But the second reason has less to do with the business side of filmmaking and a whole lot to do with story. 

"I didn't want to do Days of Future Past next," Vaughn said. "I felt that one should be in a trilogy and Days of Future Past should be the finale of that story."

Originally, Vaughn wanted to follow up First Class with a bridge movie that would lead into Days of Future Past by introducing a younger version of Wolverine.

"I would have done a film in-between where you meet the young Wolverine and a new character," Vaughn said. "And then in Days of Future Past became the young Wolverine and the old Wolverine and just really blow it out. So that's what I would have done, but the studio didn't agree with me on that."

It's tempting to puzzle out why the studio was against the idea—perhaps they, like most fans of the franchise, weren't keen on the idea of a recast Wolverine. Either way, even with that detail, it's hard not to see the epic, time-hopping scope of what Vaughn was originally gunning for. But as Collider points out from their own interview with the director, the final product of X-Men: Days of Future Past remained "pretty close" to what he had in mind for the movie—or at least, that's what he said in 2014.

It's weird to think that if Vaughn had gotten his way, we'd be looking at a potentially very different landscape for the X-Men movie series today. With a young Wolverine in the mix, who knows if we would've gotten the tour-de-force farewell of Logan, or gotten introduced to Dafne Keen's awesome mutant Laura, aka X-23? One thing's certain: if through nothing else but Ryan Reynolds' sheer tyranny of will, we probably still would've gotten Deadpool.

Regardless of this missing movie, there's plenty of material to look forward to for fans of the X-Men, from "full-fledged horror movie" New Mutants all the way to TV show The Gifted. And if you're excited for Drew Goddard's upcoming X-Force movie, brush up on your comics lore with our exhaustive feature on the weird history of the X-Force.