Christopher Nolan might’ve pulled an “inception” and retrieved (or planted?) an idea from the mind of Matthew Vaughn and his X-MEN: FIRST CLASS crew. The KICK-ASS director recently told the LA Times that he’s scrapped a dozen page sequence from the new mutant movie after watching INCEPTION this past weekend. Apparently, the scenes of spinning hallways and gravity-warping chaos bore too strong a similarity to an extended “psy-war” scene that he'd already had scripted and storyboarded. Now, he’s tasking his writers to get back to their desks and cook up something new.
The LA Times suggests that this scene might’ve recalled some classic storylines of Xavier fighting on the psychic/astral plane. If that’s the case, then it opens the obvious-in-retrospect possibility that the Shadow King will factor into this movie. You’ll recall that Prof. X first encountered this evil telepath, Amahl Farouk, on the streets of Cairo where he was leading a street gang which a young Storm was part of. I could easily see this movie riffing on that plotline to bring Ororo into the first class (as is probably going to happen) while changing enough details to streamline it into the movies’ continuity. One such change, I imagine, could shift the King’s real world incarnation from an obese Egyptian crime lord to somebody who could be played by... Kevin Bacon, perhaps? Think about it. It could work. == TEASER ==
Anyway, here’s how Vaughn broke his bittersweet experience down…
"I saw 'Inception,' which I loved… But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it's either leave it in and look as if you're copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards."
You know, the internet makes these kind of things a lot more public than they would’ve been in the past. I wonder if the Wachowski Brothers went through a similar dilemma when the first BLADE movie had a bullet-time, bullet-dodging scene while the first MATRIX was still in production.
Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of HYBRID BASTARDS! & UNIMAGINABLE. Order them on Amazon here & here.