Since the release of X-Men: Days of Future Past last May, there has been a lot of talk of the so-called "Rogue Cut" of the film, featuring scenes of Anna Paquin’s character that had been excised from the theatrical version. An extended cut of the film hits Blu-ray soon and restores this footage, and also adds a significant amount of run time to the movie.
According to Digital Spy, the new extended version of director Bryan Singer’s latest foray into the realm of the super mutant team will be eleven minutes and eleven seconds longer than the original, and feature a bunch of heretofore unseen footage. This brings the full length of the movie up to 142 minutes.
In the version we’ve all already seen (or at least you should have seen, it’s a damn good time, as well as the highest grossing chapter in the franchise), Rogue only shows up for a short time in what is essentially just a quick cameo. You see her in the flash forward scene at the end of the film, along with some other familiar faces from the original X-Men trilogy, but only after the main conflict has been resolved. In the original version, however, she played a much more substantial role.
Losing the Rogue subplot was reportedly the biggest cut made to Days of Future Past, but was made in order to keep the central story more focused. According to the reports, the new extended cut restores a big action sequence that revolves around Rogue. It sees Magneto (Ian McKellen) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) on a mission to rescue her from a kind of concentration camp controlled by the mutant-hunting robotic Sentinels.
From this description, and the fact that it clocks in at more than eleven minutes, it certainly sounds like it will be a significant addition to the movie. Having Rogue around could certainly have come in handy when Logan (Hugh Jackman) accidentally slashes Kitty Pride (Ellen Page). While it does sound like it will be a nice addition to the whole, especially for fans of the earlier films, it’s still understandable why it was left out of the theatrical run.
In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Wolverine is sent back into the 1970s to stop Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from assassinating Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the man responsible for creating the Sentinels. In the past, she was captured and her DNA used to make the automatons nearly invincible, which spelled the inevitable doom for most of mutant kind. The film also brings together the two X-Men timelines.
We’ve got the sequel to Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse on the way in 2016, and the "Rogue Cut" is expected to be released sometime this summer.
