X-Men: Days of Future Past already runs at a hefty 131 minutes, and that runtime was trimmed down from an earlier cut that featured an entire subplot. When we spoke to producer and writer Simon Kinberg about the film last April, he noted that about 10 minutes were cut out, and that this subplot heavily featured Rogue (Anna Paquin), Professor X (Patrick Stewart), and Magneto (Ian McKellen).
When the Blu-ray of Days of Future Past was released on Blu-ray, Adam interviewed Kinberg, who confirmed that the “Rogue Cut” was on the way because there wasn’t enough time to do it with the release window for the theatrical cut. Empire has now learned that the BBFC (the British equivalent of the MPAA) “has rated the extended edit as a 12 and lists the running time as 142 minutes and 37,” which is 11 minutes and 11 seconds longer than the theatrical version.
When Kinberg spoke to Steve at WonderCon last year, he provided some details on what the deleted subplot would entail:
“The biggest chunk we took out of the film from first cut to final cut was the Rogue plot. And that was the sub-plot that has now been well-publicized, but that I created, not actually to bring Rogue into the movie, though that was a wonderful consequence, but more that I wanted to have, and this was in the early script phase, I wanted a mission for old Charles and old Erik, for Magneto and Xavier to go off on a mission together.”
Kinberg went on to explain why it didn’t make the final cut:
“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 watched the movie, you were like, ‘Why are we on this detour, on a movie that already has two time periods, two types of Sentinels, 10-12 main characters, just as a lark?’ And so it ended up getting cut.”
While I’m absolutely going to see the Rogue Cut, I have to say that Days of Future Past does not hold up well on a repeat viewing. Mystique and Young Magneto don’t fit in the story as well as they did in First Class, the movie wastes Peter Dinklage, and ripping up the entire timeline is a double-edged sword that gets rid of the bad movies but also deletes the satisfactory X-Men and the best film in the series, X2. I’m certainly not going to argue against seeing more Stewart and McKellen, but I’m not sure the Rogue Cut will be an overall improvement to the movie.
UPDATE: Bryan Singer has tweeted that the new cut is actually 17 minutes longer and it also has some changes:
