X-Men: Days of Future Past was a critical and financial success upon release, building on the goodwill from First Class and laying down the foundation for next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. One of Days of Future Past‘s biggest draws was the time travel element which allowed the filmmakers to tell a story that involved both new and old casts. Chief among one of the returning faces of the old cast was Anna Paquin’s Rogue. Unfortunately, by the film’s release her sequence had been cut, reducing her appearance to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at the very end. Luckily, there have been plans to release a “Rogue Cut” if the film for quite some time… but now we have more details.
How was Rogue originally in the movie and why was she cut?
Originally, Bryan Singer gave a very businesslike explanation, “Through the editing process, the sequence became extraneous. It’s a really good sequence and it will probably end up on DVD so people can see it. But like many things in the editing process, it was an embarrassment of riches and it was just one of the things that had to go. Unfortunately, it was the one and only sequence Anna Paquin was in, the Rogue character in. Even though she’s in the materials and part of the process of making the film, she won’t appear in it.”
While we were in the dark on what that happened in that sequence, we’ve learned it involved Xavier and Magneto going on a mission to find Rogue. According to Simon Kinberg, “Just to see what that would look like. I mean, truly, seriously, it was like, ‘What would it be like to have Patrick and Ian on a road trip together?’ And that was kind of, you know, it got condensed as I wrote it and then when we shot it, but it was just a sub-plot. It was a perfectly good sub-plot and people will see it one day, and Anna was great in it and it was well-directed; it just didn’t serve the overall story. And it didn’t, it never did, it was created outside the core story. As a result, when you watch the movie, you were like ‘Why are we on this detour, on a movie that already have two time periods, two types of Sentinels, 10-12 main characters, just as a lark?’ And so it ended up getting cut.”
So, what’s changing with the Rogue Cut?
17 minutes are being added into the film, presumably containing the entirety of Xavier and Erik’s mission to get Rogue into the film. In addition, Bryan Singer has also reportedly made “a few little changes” to the rest of the movie, most likely containing material that keeps the rest of the movie consistent with the new sequence.
When is it coming out?
July 14th, the release date of the first X-Men film in 2000. The Rogue Cut’s release will celebrate the original’s 15th anniversary.
