20th Century Fox/Disney
While appearing at New York Comic Con over the weekend, director Matthew Vaughn said that he walked away from directing 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand after a studio exec revealed their plan to tricking Halle Berry into starring in the film.
According to Vaughn, the unnamed executive said that a scene involving Berry’s character Storm saving children in Africa had been written in only to appease the Academy Award-winning actress enough to sign onto the project and would be scrapped once filming began.
“One of the main reasons I quit X-Men 3, and this is a true story,” Vaughn said while appearing at New York Comic-Con over the weekend.
“I went to an executive’s office and I saw an X3 script. It was a lot fatter. I asked, ‘What is this draft?’ They were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ So I grabbed it, and opened the first page, and it said, ‘Africa. Kids dying from no water, and Storm creates a thunderstorm to save all these children.’”
“I thought it was a pretty cool idea. I said, ‘What is this?’ They said, ‘This is the Halle Berry script, because she hasn’t signed on yet. This is what she wants it to be. And once she signs on, we’ll throw it in the bin.’ I thought, if you’re going to do that to an Oscar-winning actress who plays Storm, I quit,” he said.
Despite bailing on the ultimately awful X-Men: The Last Stand, Vaughn did eventually get to helm an X-Men film as he directed 2011’s well-received franchise reboot X-Men: First Class.
Following his work on the X-Men franchise, Vaughn has been busy with the Kingsman franchise, having directed three films in the series since 2014. Vaughn’s newest film Argylle is just a few months away from releasing as the film will be hitting movie theaters in the United States on Friday, February 2.
The 52-year-old filmmaker also said at Comic-Con that the sequel to 2021’s The King’s Man has been written and will be titled The Traitor King. You can check out the first official trailer for Argylle below.