X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn recently detailed his experience developing 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand before his dismissal.
Appearing at a panel discussion at the 2023 New York Comic Con to promote his upcoming spy comedy Argylle, Vaughn spoke about the brief period when he was attached to direct the third X-Men installment for Fox after franchise director Bryan Singer passed on it to helm Superman Returns.
“Yeah, that was bizarre because I went from Layer Cake, a tiny 3 million pound movie, and suddenly I got Hollywood calling up saying, ‘Would you like to make an X-Men movie?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ And I thought X2 is a masterpiece. So I was worried about trying to step into Bryan Singer’s shoes, and it was a dream come true,” Vaughn said.
“I storyboarded the movie,” he continued. “The end of the movie was not the movie I was gonna make. The Golden Gate sequence was the beginning of Act Two and we had this crazy action sequence for Washington … but I was naive.”
What made Matthew Vaughn quit X-Men: The Last Stand?
In leaping from small-scale gangster movies to a studio blockbuster, Vaughn revealed what made him walk away from The Last Stand — it was the revelation that Fox presented a hoax screenplay to Storm actor Halle Berry featuring a scene of her mutant character saving African children. The intent was to use the fake script to get Berry to sign on to the threequel 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 earned the weakest critical reception of the initial three X-Men movies despite being the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. Vaughn bounced back from the disappointing experience when he earned high praise for his work in 2010’s Kick-Ass. The director returned to the X-Men franchise with the highly successful prequel X-Men: First Class in 2011. Today, Vaughn looks back at The Last Stand as a big lesson in working in Hollywood.
“The way I produce films was, ‘Here’s a budget and a schedule, stick to it.’ And Hollywood doesn’t work that way. They go, ‘Here’s the budget. Here’s a schedule. We’re going to pretend we’re going to do it for that and then we’ll make it all up,’ and I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that back then. So I was naive to walk out. I was given the speech, ‘You’ll never work in this town again,’ and I sort of believed in that,” Vaughn said. “The man who said you’ll never work in this town again watched Kick-Ass. And to his credit, he rang me up and said, ‘You know what, I didn’t mean it when I said that.'”
