Before Brett Ratner signed on to helm X-Men 3, aka X-Men: The Last Stand, Matthew Vaughn was in line to direct the movie for 20th Century Fox.
Vaughn, who would go on to helm X-Men: First Class, has spoken in vague terms about stepping away from the movie in the past, but during an appearance at this weekend's New York Comic-Con (via THR), the Kick-Ass filmmaker revealed the rather shocking reason he ultimately decided to quit the project.
“I went into one of the executive’s office and I saw an X3 script, and I immediately knew it was a lot fatter. I was like, 'what the hell is this draft.' He went, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m the director. I’m worrying about this draft,'” Vaughn recalled. “He wouldn’t tell me, so I grabbed it literally — it was like a crazy moment — opened the first page, and it said, ‘Africa. Storm. Kids dying of no water. She creates a thunderstorm and saves all these children.'”
Vaughn had read over what he felt was a “pretty cool idea,” without initially realizing that the powers that be had no intention of actually putting the scene in the final film, and had simply added it to the script in an attempt to "trick" Halle Berry into agreeing to reprise the role of Ororo Munroe.
“[I went,] ‘What is this?’ [They said,] ‘Oh, it’s Halle Berry’s script. I went, ‘OK, because she hasn’t signed up yet.’ ‘But this is what she wants it to be, and once she signs up, we’ll throw it in the bin,'” the director continued, recounting the unnamed executive’s response. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re gonna do that to an Oscar-winning actress who plays Storm? I’m outta here.’ So I quit at that point.”
Vaughn had only directed one feature, Layer Cake, at the time, and was very excited to be offered such a massive studio tentpole - before coming to the realization that he wasn't going to have much control over the film.
"So I was worried about trying to step into Bryan Singer's shoes, and it was a dream come true. I storyboarded the movie. 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."
Vaughn says he was given the "You'll never work in this town again" speech after ditching X-Men 3, and "sort of believed in that" back then.
"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,'" he added.
Vaughn is currently working on a Kick-Ass reboot and a fourth Kingsman movie.