Anna Paquin will be added back to X-Men: Days Of Future Past for a special "Rogue Cut" that will be re-released on home video platforms next summer. Paquin’s scenes were deemed surplus to requirements when director Bryan Singer started to edit the summer blockbuster, which was released back in May and was immediately lauded as both a critical and financial success.
According to Variety, the extended version of Days Of Future Past will become available to purchase in the early months of 2015. Its writer and producer, Simon Kinberg, made the announcement as he promoted the release of the theatrical version of Days Of Future Past, which is now available digitally, and will hit shelves on both DVD and Blu-ray on October 14. It’s also been announced that over 10 minutes worth of extra footage will be included in the Rogue Cut, including Paquin’s miscellaneous sequences and numerous other scenes that feature various other characters.
Earlier this year, just before Days Of Future Past hit cinemas, it was revealed that both Kinberg and Singer had reached the conclusion that Rogue’s scenes simply couldn’t be squeezed into their time-traveling adventure. Kinberg went on to reveal that Rogue’s sequence actually brought us more of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen as Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, as they embarked on a road-trip to retrieve Rogue.
Any scene that features Stewart and McKellen playing off each other is good in my book, especially when there’s the added possible conflict of the duo arguing over what radio station to listen to. Clearly Xavier is a classical guy, while Magneto can surely only be in metal.
While there’s no denying the fact that the excellent Days Of Future Past, which I believe helped to rejuvenate a franchise that had become a tad stale, probably wouldn’t have been ruined by the addition of McKellan and Stewart’s adventure, you have to trust that Kinberg and Singer recognized this scene slightly derailed the other plots that simmered around it.X-Men Days Of Future Past was always intended to revolve around James McAvoy’s younger incarnation of Charles Xavier anyway, and adding more scenes of Stewart’s Xavier would probably have only convoluted the story, and it really wasn’t worth the risk adding it to the cinematic pot.
Kinberg has now admitted that it was the "most complicated movie" that he’s ever worked on. Which is no surprise when you consider that he needed to unite the characters that had appeared in the first trilogy with their younger selves from Matthew Vaughn’s First-Class, while also introducing both a time-traveling element, as well as the likes of Quicksilver too. However, you have to say that Kinberg managed these issues with aplomb, and the blockbuster ebbs and flows perfectly.
Of course, Singer also deserves praise for the way that he paced the adventure, and it’s a relief to hear that, even though he has vowed never to work on a time-travel movie again because of Days Of Future Past, Kinberg will return to the franchise, alongside the director, for the 1980s set, X-Men: Apocalypse. I’m already dreaming that he’ll somehow find a way to squeeze in a quick sequence of Xavier and Magneto backpacking across Europe together.
