Bryan Singer's X-Men: Apocalypse and James Mangold's The Wolverine are connected for obvious reasons, as they are both part of 20th Century Fox's larger X-Men movie franchise... but the two titles share more in common than you know. Specifically, there is actually one shot that is almost identical in both movies, as the former actively borrowed one particular moment featured in the latter.
This revelation was recently made by Bryan Singer and writer/producer Simon Kinberg, who talk about the reused shot in the new commentary track attached to the digital release of X-Men: Apocalypse. The moment can be found about 26 minutes into the movie, as Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) is having a nightmare that is causing the entire school to shake. Professor X (James McAvoy) goes into her room to investigate, but discovers serious trouble when he taps into her mind and sees all varieties of death and destruction -- shown in montage. While it sounds like most of the material is new, Singer and Kinberg cop to the fact that they borrowed one of the shots from The Wolverine - particularly a part from early in the 2013 film when the atomic bomb has exploded in Nagasaki.
You can see a side-by-side comparison of the shot in question below:
As Bryan Singer points out on the X-Men: Apocalypse commentary track, they removed a few fences (as you can see), and gave the whole thing a red tint, but other than that it's pretty easy to recognize the shot from The Wolverine. You just need to look at the burst of fire in the air on the left, and the house being destroyed at the top, and you immediately notice that the moments are the same.
Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg are surprisingly casual when they talk about the reused shot on the commentary, and while this is partially because they totally had the legal right to borrow footage from The Wolverine, the other reason is because this isn't exactly a foreign activity in the movie world. Michael Bay reused stuff from The Island for Transformers: Dark of the Moon; Ridley Scott used material from The Shining for the end of Blade Runner; and Disney's animated Robin Hood clearly has sequences that were traced over moments from both Snow White and The Aristocats. So before you go judging the X-Men: Apocalypse filmmakers for their use of a clip from The Wolverine, consider that their sin is pretty minor compared to others (did you even notice it before we pointed it out?).
For those of you who would like to hear Bryan Singer and Simon Kinberg talk about the reused The Wolverine scene and a lot more, you can purchase your own digital copy of X-Men: Apocalypse now.
