At this stage, Matthew Vaughn has passed on more X-Men movies than he's actually made. While he agreed to reboot the team with 2011's X-Men: First Class (a prequel to 2000s X-Men with a new, younger cast), the Kick-Ass helmer declined to take charge of both X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Days of Future Past.
Earlier this month, Vaughn reflected on 20th Century Fox's attempt to fool Halle Berry into boarding the former by tempting her with fake script pages they intended to later cut.
Elaborating on that anecdote in an interview with Happy Sad Confused, the filmmaker suggested various executives were the problem and recalled being told that, after deciding against taking charge of X-Men: The Last Stand, his Hollywood career was over.
"I was literally told by [former 20th Century Fox president Tom Rothman] and X amount of people, 'You'll never work in this town again. You do not walk off an X-Men movie! You're an arrogant idiot. You've only done one film as a director. What are you doing?'" Vaughn remembered. "I walked off X-Men, it was a long story, but there was a lot of lies, and I was naive, because I didn't realize they would've actually given me much more time and more money to solve it, but I just wasn't comfortable with [it]."
"I mean, some of the lies, that these other [execs], not Rothman...total lies about casting, and the way they were dealing with other actors."
As for how he reacted to the studio's plan to deceive Berry, Vaughn adds, "I was like, 'Wow. If you're going to do that to an Oscar-winning actress, I'm f***ed.' So, I literally got a cab and went home. And they're like, 'Where are you?' And I went, 'I'm at home in London.' And they weren't happy about that."
X-Men: The Last Stand ended up being directed by Brett Ratner from a script by Simon Kinberg (years later, he'd take another crack at "The Dark Phoenix Saga," only to drop the ball on that story for a second time).
With a budget of $210 million, the threequel was actually the most expensive movie ever made when it was released in 2006, but a $460.4 million global haul at the box office and negative reviews are what ultimately led to Vaughn's reboot.
Now, Marvel Studios is developing multiple X-Men projects, though none of them are expected to arrive on our screens until after Avengers: Secret Wars in 2027.