Late last month, actress Sophie Turner posted an intriguing still from X-Men: Apocalypse on her personal Instagram page. The image showcased Turner as Jean Grey standing with Tye Sheridan’s Cyclops in a record store, showing off a fictional LP from the Marvel Comics mutant Dazzler. The picture got a lot of attention, but it should be known that this scene isn’t actually in the finished movie. Instead, it’s part of a mall sequence that sadly didn’t make the theatrical cut of the film.
What was in this mall sequence? Why did it get cut? These are questions fans may find themselves asking coming out of X-Men: Apocalypse, but the good news is that we have the answers for you. When I recently had the opportunity to sit down with director Bryan Singer, he told me all about the deleted scene and why you’ll have to wait until the movie is on Blu-ray to see it for yourselves:
What’s In The Deleted Mall Scene
In the movie, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and Jubilee (Lana Condor) all journey out for a day at the mall, and while there are parts of the longer sequence still in the theatrical cut, Bryan Singer says there is a lot more fun that was cut together into a montage of sorts. A TV spot has already revealed that the group of young mutants make a stop for some cold drinks (which wind up giving Nightcrawler some distressing brain freeze), but there’s a whole lot more to it than just that. Said the director,
There’s a much [longer version of that scene]. I did an entire montage of them hanging around the mall, going to record stores, going to an arcade that I named after my childhood arcade, Space Port, when I lived in New Jersey… The whole idea was to show them among people, and it was fun, it was set to music.
In his description of the sequence, Bryan Singer also went as far as to describe two of the specific beats - including a humorous moment in the record store not involving the Dazzler album:
There’s one really fun beat where, well, she pointed it out, Sophie Turner – who is gorgeous – her strange resemblance to Boy George on the cover of this one album. So we literally have a scene, which you’ll see on the DVD, where Cyclops says, ‘Anyone ever tell you you look like this?’ (pretends to hold up a record). And she’s like, ‘Scott!’ It’s great. There’s a lot of sweet moments – one where Nightcrawler looks and people are just staring at him. There’s one where a guy just nods and smiles. And he’s like, ‘They don’t fear us!’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, because mutants live among us now.’
Do you read about this fun sequence and find yourself really wishing that it wound up in the movie? Well, head to the next page, and you’ll understand from Bryan Singer’s perspective why it just didn’t fit in X-Men: Apocalypse and needed to be excised.
Why The Mall Sequence Was Cut
This sequence sounds pretty cool, right? Are you now wondering why it didn’t wind up making the cut in X-Men: Apocalypse? Well, fortunately Bryan Singer didn’t leave that side of things a mystery during the interview. In the midst of his explanation as to what happens in the mall sequence, he also explained why it wound up hitting the cutting room floor. The reason? When taken in as part of the entire movie, it simply didn’t fit. Said Singer,
And in the end, when you look at a film as a feature, it’s called ‘the collective experience.’ And you find certain things that you loved so much in individual scenes, they somehow disrupt the collective experience. And so that was one area where I made a drastic reduction – well, not that drastic a reduction. It’s like a minute or two, or less. But there are some fun beats!
As Bryan Singer noted, the good news here is that this mall sequence won’t exactly disappear forever. Instead, we can expect that it will be prominently featured on the movie’s Blu-ray and DVD release (albeit not cut back into the film). Knowing the pattern of how long it takes for X-Men movies to go from theaters to home video, we can probably expect to see the full version of the deleted scene sometime in September.
In the meantime, you can catch X-Men: Apocalypse in theaters on Friday, May 27th, and go to the next page to watch Bryan Singer talk about the mall sequence!
