Almost 17 years later, director Matthew Vaughn finally explained why he walked out on X-Men: The Last Stand while it was still being developed, even though he would eventually return to the franchise.
The Kick Ass director revealed he learned the studio was planning to use a fake script to trick Halle Berry into signing onto the film. He recalled the bizarre moment during New York Comic Con, where he told the audience, “This is a true story and I don’t care if I’m not meant to say it. Hollywood is really political and odd,” per ScreenRant.
“I went to an executive’s office and I saw an X3 script. It was a lot fatter,” he claimed. “I asked, ‘What is this draft?’ They were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
“So I grabbed it, and opened the first page, and it said, ‘Africa. Kids dying from no water, and Storm creates a thunderstorm to save all these children.’ I thought it was a pretty cool idea.”
Vaughn continued, “I said, ‘What is this?’ They said, ‘This is the Halle Berry script because she hasn’t signed on yet. This is what she wants it to be. And once she signs on, we’ll throw it in the bin.’ I thought, if you’re going to do that to an Oscar-winning actress who plays Storm, I quit. I thought I’m mincemeat.”
Vaughn instead went on to direct Stardust and Kick-Ass before returning to Marvel in 2011 to direct X-Men: First Class, which would kick off its own prequel series.
The director also revealed that he was meant to direct X-Men: Days of Future Past, too, but “Hollywood forgot to tell me, after I wrote the damn thing, that Bryan [Singer] got to direct it first.”
The Last Stand co-writer Simon Kinberg has previously said Vaughn’s vision for the movie was “a major departure from Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two movies.”
Speaking to Polygon, Kingberg explained, “Matthew himself is a world builder — or maybe more than a world builder, a tone builder. He wanted to do something tonally very different than the previous two films. And so we were really in the script phase, even through pre-production, because Matthew was aboard for a long time.”
He later added that Vaughn’s “tone” could be seen more in his franchise debut, X-Men: First Class.
The X-Men franchise may just have bad luck when it comes to directors.
Brett Ratner instead directed The Last Stand after Vaughn exited the project. He was later criticized by multiple members of the cast and accused of sexual assault, which he denied.
Singer also faced his own spate of issues while working on X-Men, including when the cast tried to stage an intervention over his alleged drug use on the set of X2.