Though Bryan Singer's X-Men: Apocalypse is about to drop into theaters around the world, the title mutant's team of supervillains that you'll seen on screen isn't necessarily the one Singer and producer Simon Kinberg initially envisioned. That's not exactly a surprise considering that the Marvel comics have gone through quite a few iterations of the Four Horsemen over the years. Yes, the teams have featured Storm, Psylocke, Archangel, and Magneto, but you might be surprised to find out that Wolverine, Gambit, the Hulk, and even Professor X have also been the heralds of Apocalypse.
So when Cinemablend caught up with Kinberg to talk about all things X-Men, the question inevitably came up concerning which team-ups the creative folks behind the film toyed with for the final fearsome foursome. What's surprising is that not only did one character not make the initial cut, but that another character almost joined the Horsemen instead. Be aware that SPOILERS for the movie follow below!
Here's what Kinberg had to say about the evolution of the Four Horsemen team throughout the production process:
The one person we didn’t know was Psylocke, and the reason why is because originally in the script we sort of… I don’t know why we made this decision, but we knew that Professor X was abducted in the middle of the movie, and we thought that almost counted as a fourth Horseman. And so that’s the way we constructed the original draft of the script. There wasn’t going to be a fourth one. The ‘surprise’ was that Xavier was the fourth Horseman. And then when we were working on the script, Bryan and I at one particular point – pretty late in the process – said, ‘He’s not really a Horseman – he’s not doing anything in the third act of the movie.’
Yes, you read that right: Professor X almost became one of Apocalypse's most lethal henchmen! This actually happened in the animated series X-Men: Evolution, in which Apocalypse enslaved Professor X and Magneto as Death and War respectively, but that turn of events won't happen in the live-action film.
When our own Adam Chitwood had a chance to visit the set of X-Men: Apocalypse, Kinberg also clarified how Olivia Munn came to play Psylocke, the last of Apocalypse's Horsemen:
“Psylocke was quite a late addition to the script and the movie. Bryan Singer and I were up here in Montreal and we felt like we needed a different Horseman, and we just started going through the cycling of the different Apocalypse Horsemen over history. We felt like we wanted it to be a female character and we pretty quickly settled on Psylocke. And super randomly I think a week or two earlier I was in Los Angeles and we were casting Deadpool. I had met with Olivia Munn for a character in Deadpool that ultimately wasn’t the right character for her, but we were like ‘We’ve gotta keep in touch, she has to do something in the X-Menworld.’ And Bryan and I were sitting in Montreal a few weeks later and saying we should do Psylocke and I was like, ‘Dude, I just met with Olivia Munn two weeks ago. She’d be great.’ Then we looked at pictures of her online and I emailed her and I said, ‘I think this is a great character for you’ and she immediately emailed me back and sent me all this fan art online that fans had done of her as Psylocke. So that’s how that one came to be.”
So remember, kiddos, keep churning out that fan art and fan-fic; you never know, someday some shotcaller might just happen upon it and decide to turn your imaginative efforts into a blockbuster movie!
For more of our coverage on all things X-Men, take a look at some of our recent stories below:
- James McAvoy Shaves His Head for ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ While Patrick Stewart Watches
- ‘New Mutants’: Simon Kinberg Says Professor X Will Appear; Filming Could Begin Early 2017
- ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Clip Shows How Scott Summers Became Cyclops
- ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Review: Strong Start, Sloppy Finish
- Next ‘X-Men’ Movie to Take Place in the 90s, Says Simon Kinberg
