Director James Cameron Helped Tweak X-Men: Days Of Future Past Ending

Bryan Singer may be on the verge of unleashing Apocalypse upon the world, but three years ago, the director and co-writer Simon Kinberg were still pulling together the finale of mutant sequel, X-Men: Days of Future Past.

In adapting one of the most ambitious comic book entries into the X-Men canon, Singer and Kinberg were wary of the near-insurmountable task on their hands from the off, but as the creative pair began to near a conclusion, they sought help from genre expert James Cameron.

Word comes by way of ComingSoon, who spoke to Singer while visiting the set of X-Men: Apocalypse, the third and likely final installment in his prequel trilogy. Speaking with the benefit of hindsight, the director hinted that the finale for Days of Future Past was almost different in tone to the one that made the final cut.

Said he:

“Originally my editor was obsessed with this visual blurriness. So when Wolverine is walking around he’s seeing things in kind of a blurriness. So I sent that to Jim and Jim called me up and goes ‘Bryan, that blurry thing made me think that the wool was going to be pulled out from under me and I was not satisfied. I thought it was going to be a lie and it had failed and it would all be dark, and then suddenly it was okay.’ It was the only note Jim gave me. He said ‘Oh I love the movie, it’s going to be great,’ but he said ‘Let the audience enjoy the fact that it all turned out okay… in that future.’” So I pulled the effect off and my editor was like ‘Oh I like it, it’s so cool and weird!’ and I’m like ‘Shut up, it’s coming off!’”

Cameron’s influence in the sci-fi genre knows no bounds, having ordered a robot uprising in the Terminator series and built a sprawling, blue-tinged universe of his own through Avatar. Indeed, assisting on the script for X-Men: Days of Future Past isn’t the first time James Cameron has weighed on in a project at 20th Century Fox, after it was revealed that both he and David Fincher helped champion the early R-rated cut of Tim Miller’s soon-to-be-released Deadpool.