Elijah Williams
X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn has shared his fascinating experience developing 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand before his unexpected departure. Speaking at a panel discussion during the 2023 New York Comic Con to promote his upcoming spy comedy Argylle, Vaughn revealed the brief period when he was chosen to direct the third X-Men installment for Fox after franchise director Bryan Singer passed on it to helm Superman Returns.
“Yeah, it was quite bizarre because I went from Layer Cake, a small 3 million pound movie, and suddenly Hollywood was calling me up, asking, ‘Would you like to make an X-Men movie?’ And of course, I said, ‘Yes.’ I mean, X-2 is a masterpiece, so I was worried about stepping into Bryan Singer’s shoes. But it was truly a dream come true,” Vaughn expressed.
He continued, “I even storyboarded the movie. However, the end result was not the movie I had envisioned. The Golden Gate sequence was meant to be the beginning of Act Two, and we had this mind-blowing action sequence planned for Washington… but I was naive.”
What made Matthew Vaughn quit X-Men: The Last Stand?
When transitioning from small-scale gangster movies to a major studio blockbuster, Vaughn revealed the reason behind his departure from The Last Stand — it was the discovery that Fox had presented a fake screenplay to Halle Berry, who played Storm, featuring a scene of her mutant character saving African children. The intention was to use the bogus script to convince Berry to sign on for the third film, which Vaughn found disrespectful to the Oscar winner. Shortly after Vaughn’s exit, Rush Hour director Brett Ratner took over the project.
Released in the summer of 2006, X-Men: The Last Stand received the weakest critical reception among the initial three X-Men movies, despite being the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. However, Vaughn bounced back from this disappointing experience when he received high praise for his work on 2010’s Kick-Ass. The director eventually returned to the X-Men franchise with the highly successful prequel X-Men: First Class in 2011. Today, Vaughn reflects on The Last Stand as a valuable lesson in navigating the complexities of Hollywood.
“My approach to producing films was always, ‘Here’s a budget and a schedule, stick to it.’ But Hollywood doesn’t work that way. They say, ‘Here’s the budget. Here’s a schedule. We’ll pretend we’re going to stick to it, and then we’ll figure it out as we go along.’ I didn’t know that. I was naive to walk away. I was even told, ‘You’ll never work in this town again,’ and I actually believed it,” Vaughn shared. “The person who said I’d never work again watched Kick-Ass. And to his credit, he called me up and said, ‘You know what, I didn’t mean it when I said that.'”
