Last year, when X-Men: Days of Future Past hit theaters, it was full of familiar mutants, a few newcomers, and numerous storylines playing out in different eras. One character originally slated to appear, but who wound up on the cutting room floor, was Anna Paquin’s Rogue, who fans know from the very first run of X-Men movies. As it turns out, however, she didn’t really mind being left out all that much.
The 33-year-old actress, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1993 at the age of eleven, first played Rogue in 2000’s X-Men. Even though she didn’t make the final cut of Days of Future Past, aside from a brief cameo to punctuate the rewritten timeline at the end, she told Yahoo that her stint on set was still a damn fine time. She said:
[While filming], I got to hang out with my friends for five days in Montreal, and see people I’ve known for two decades and go play. Did it end up in the movie? No. Well, it was fun anyway.
Though Rogue was ultimately excised from director Bryan Singer’s film, she did eventually get her day. After much fan outcry, 20th Century Fox released the so-called Rogue Cut of Days of Future Past on Blu-ray, and the alternate edit restored a full seventeen minutes of footage and an entirely unseen story arc that was in the script and filmed, though removed for the theatrical release.
While the restored version does admittedly have some nice moments, and fans do love them some Rogue, once you watch it, it becomes easy to see why it was trimmed from a movie that was already well over two hours long. It really would have been just one more aside in a film that was very, very full to begin with, and it was cut to quicken the tempo and smooth out some uneven pacing issues. Fans appreciate the addition, but it’s more for those who want a complete view, as this arc pulls the viewer away from the main narrative.
In the cut scenes, shortly after Logan (Hugh Jackman) accidentally stabs Kitty Pride (Ellen Page), they decide to keep his consciousness in the past by transferring her powers to another mutant. Fans of the franchise are well aware that Rogue has the ability to absorb and use such aptitudes from others. Unfortunately, she’s one of many who have been captured by the Sentinels, and Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Ice Man (Shawn Ashmore) are dispatched to break her out of her prison in order to prevent the future from becoming a terrible, mutant-hating wasteland of shit and despair.
As far as we know, Anna Paquin won’t be back for the next chapter, X-Men: Apocalypse, which opens next year (or Gambit, for that matter), but when comic book movies are concerned, never say never until you see the movie. And sometimes not even then.
