Movie marketing can be an utterly bizarre experience. Every brand and company want to find a way to tie themselves into popular media, as being the "official" anything of a film is guaranteed to get more eyeballs on your brand name. Of course, this occasionally leads to really odd pairings, like the "official real estate partner" of X-Men: Apocalypse. The upside of that, is that we get to see more of the extensive mansion set that was created for the most recent movie. Check out the behind the scenes at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.
While the realtor connection is a little heavy handed, the information included in the mini-feature is actually really interesting. We hadn’t really noticed previously just how much of what we’ve seen in the X-Men: Apocalypse trailers takes place in the mansion, but the fact that this set is double the size of what it has been in previous films makes sense now that we realize just how much of the movie actually takes place there. The work that apparently went into designing the multiple levels of Xavier's mansion, as well as the exterior, seems massive. We wonder if anybody actually tried living on the set. It could probably have been done.
Of course, it also makes one feel bad about all the work that these people put into the set, because something else we’ve learned from the trailer, is that they had to blow it all up. We get to see some of that in this video, as well. We also know that Quicksilver’s big moment in X-Men: Apocalypse occurs inside the mansion, which may also be a major reason that the set needed to be so large. If you’re going to have him running through all of it at high speed, you need to have enough of the mansion for him to run through that it doesn’t look like he’s moving through the same rooms over and over again.
It’s certainly a major change from the last time we saw the X-mansion, in Deadpool, when they joked about how little of it we saw. That film certainly didn’t have the budget to build as extensive a set as X-Men: Apocalypse did.
The work that went into creating Xavier’s School will likely go a long way into creating a realistic world for the newest X-Men film. We’re looking forward to seeing more of the building than we ever have before. What do you think of the mansion? After the explosion, you can probably get a decent deal from Coldwell Banker if you’d like to make an offer.
