Matthew Vaughn gave a new life to the X-Men franchise with X-Men: First Class, and if he had stayed with the series, then the next film might have been an entirely different story.
He was the co-writer for the next film X-Men: Days of Future Past, however, it was directed by the original X-Men maker Bryan Singer while Vaugh went on to direct Kingsman: The Secret Service instead of continuing with X-Men.
“The reason I haven’t done sequels in the past is they just weren’t exciting me,” Vaughn told Collider. “And on Days of Future Past, even though I co-wrote the bloody thing, the reason I bailed out of it is two things: First, I respect Bryan Singer hugely and X-Men is Bryan’s world and I feel he let me play in his sandbox. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my sandbox. I wanted my own sandbox.”
Another reason was that though he got the credit as a co-writer, X-Men: Days of Future Past wasn’t the kind of a film he wanted to direct. Instead, his heart was in directing a film that featured a younger Wolverine.
“And, second, I didn’t want to do Days of Future Past next,” he said. “I felt that one should be in a trilogy and Days of Future Past should be the finale of that story. I would have done a film in-between where you meet the young Wolverine and a new character, and then Days of Future Past became the young Wolverine and the old Wolverine and just really blow it out.”
Despite that, Vaughn stated that the X-Men: Days of Future Past, as created by Singer was quite similar to how he had visualized it.
“Bryan [Singer] did a few things, which I thought were genius that weren’t in my script,” Vaughn said. “I had Juggernaut breaking into the Pentagon, he changed it to Quicksilver and did that fucking brilliantly, I have to add. My idea was the sentinels at the end, I wanted them to look like Mystique. I thought there should be thousands of Mystiques attacking them in the future. He changed a few more of the mutants, but it was pretty close. Yeah, it was pretty close.”
The X-Men trilogy that had started with X-Men: First Class ended with the X-Men: Apocalypse which was also directed by Bryan Singer. That trilogy is now over, and a new movie arc for X-Men will now be produced beginning with X-Men: Dark Phoenix in 2018.
As of now, Vaughn is busy with the promotions of his sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circlewhich will release globally on September 22, 2017.
