X-Men: Days of Future Past/Trivia

Trivia for X-Men: Days of Future Past.

• Much like their counterparts in the Days of Future Past storyline from the comics, Kitty Pryde, Storm, Colossus, and Wolverine are alive at the beginning of the film. Professor X and Iceman are also shown to be alive, deviating from the source material where their characters are deceased at the start of the storyline.
• Matthew Vaughn was supposed to return to direct this movie but he decided to decline. Bryan Singer, the director of the first two X-Men films and a producer, was hired to direct.
• Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were performing in a touring production of "Waiting for Godot" when Bryan Singer approached the actors about reprising their respective roles as Professor X and Magneto. McKellen has said both men were utterly shocked, as they thought to have passed the roles on to James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, and would never play the characters again. Both Stewart and McKellen were delighted to return to two of their most popular roles, and to work with the younger actors playing the same characters as well.
• The Days of Future Past storyline was selected as this film's plot in part because it would allow the filmmakers to reconcile the continuity dissonance between X-Men: First Class and the original X-Men film series. The time travel element would also remove X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and The Wolverine from the series continuity. This would allow any future movies in the franchise to be set in a new timeline with "First Class" and "Days of Future Past", with the actors from the original series able to continue reprising their roles.
• The film is influenced by the "X-Men" comics 'Days of Future Past' (1981) and *'All-New X-Men' (2012), both of which involve time-traveling mutants who seek to change history for the better.
• When Matthew Vaughn was going to direct, he was going to make the film a direct sequel to "X-Men: First Class" and have it set in the 1970s. Early ideas included an opening with the Kennedy assassination being caused by Magneto, and mutant encounters set in the Civil rights movement/the Vietnam War.
• According to Bryan Singer, he had a two-hour discussion with James Cameron, director of the time-travel films "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", about how to make the time-travel concept feasible and workable within the film.
  
• Alan Cumming declined to reprise his role as Nightcrawler from "X2" due to the heavy make-up demands for the character.
• This is the third film in the X-Men series to be based on one of Chris Claremont's stories from the comic book. "God Loves, Man Kills" was the inspiration for "X2", while "The Dark Phoenix Saga" was included in that film and "X-Men: The Last Stand". Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past have also both been adapted as episodes of the 'X-Men (1992) (TV)' animated series.
• Unlike most of the actors who've appeared throughout the X-Men franchise, January Jones was not asked to reprise the role she originated in "X-Men: First Class".
• Due to Halle Berry's pregnancy, Storm won't fly or have any fighting scenes in the film.
• Including his cameo in "X-Men: First Class", this will be Hugh Jackman's seventh portrayal of Logan/Wolverine, raising his own record for the most times a comic book character has been played by the same actor in theatrical films. He will also be the only actor to appear in the entire X-Men film series.
• Jason Flemyng was originally set to reprise his role as Azazel when Matthew Vaughn was still set to direct. When Vaughn left, the storyline was dropped in favor of the time travel/crossover storyline, and Azazel's role cut from the script to accommodate characters from the original "X-Men" film series.
• John Ottman is the first composer to score more than one movie of the series.
• According to Bryan Singer, he had a two-hour discussion with James Cameron, director of the time-travel films Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, about how to make the time-travel concept feasible and workable within the film. The concepts the two discussed included alternate universes and string theory (a field of quantum physics that define multiple universes).
• The original story on which this film is based involved time travel from the year 2013, the same year in which filming began.
• Jamie Campbell Bower and Nico Tortorella auditioned for the role of Quicksilver.
• The addition of Evan Peters as Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver to the cast sparked wide discussion over the direction of the character who is also slated to appear in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Quicksilver had been discussed previously as a potential character in both "X-Men: The Last Stand" and "The Avengers", but legal complexities over the license to the character resulted in his omission from both films. However, in May 2013 both Marvel and Fox Studios announced a resolution to the previous legal issues, and that Quicksilver would appear in this film as well as an Avengers sequel, though under certain parameters: no reference to Quicksilver's membership in the Avengers can be made in an "X-Men" film, and no allusion to his relations to the X-Men or Magneto (the character's father) can be made in an "Avengers" film; the rights agreement between Fox and Marvel even goes so far as to stipulate the character cannot be referred to as a "mutant" in any Marvel film. Additionally, the day after the announcement of Peters's casting, Marvel and Fox entered into a legal standoff over provisions of the rights agreement for the character, including the issue of whether Peters would be allowed to portray Quicksilver in any other film outside the "X-Men" franchise, possibly necessitating a second actor to play Quicksilver in any Marvel film, resulting in two different versions of the same character appearing in two competing film series. As of May 2013, this dispute which also includes the character Scarlet Witch (Quicksilver's twin sister) has yet to be resolved.
• Patrick Stewart returns to the role of Professor Charles Xavier despite the character's apparent death in "X-Men: The Last Stand". Director Bryan Singer has said that this discontinuity will be addressed in the film, as well as the absence of Cyclops (James Marsden) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), both of whom were thought dead, though Singer has suggested otherwise.
• Chris Claremont, the writer of the original 'Days of Future Past' comic, was brought on as a consultant.
• This is the fourth X-Men film to be based on a Chris Claremont "X-Men" comic:"X2" was adapted from 'God Loves, Man Kills'"X-Men: The Last Stand" was based on 'The Dark Phoenix Saga'"The Wolverine" was based on his comic of the same title.
• Peters described Quicksilver as someone who "talks quick, moves quick. Everything else is very slow compared to him, it's like he's always at the ATM waiting for the dude in front of him to finish."
• A life-size model of a Sentinel robot was constructed for filming.
• Bryan Singer filmed the mutant Quicksilver's scenes in a special format of 3600 frames per second. This was done to showcase Quicksilver's speed ability: 3600 fps is 150 times slower than normal film (which is at 24 fps), so Quicksilver will be seen moving to 150 times as fast as normal.
• The release of the teaser trailer for this film ignited such interest, director Bryan Singer made the unprecedented move of recording an actual commentary track to it the following day, explaining the significance of certain scenes and offering more insight into what to expect from the film.
• The four main female X-Men in the principal cast (Halle Berry, Jennifer Lawrence, Ellen Page, and Anna Paquin) are all Academy Award nominees.
• Bryan Singer based the time travel in the film on string theory: "Until an object is observed, it hasn't really happened yet. The time-traveller whose consciousness travels through time I call The Observer, and until the Observer returns to where he travelled from, the result hasn't occurred yet. So he can muck about in the past and it isn't until he snaps back that the new future is set. As a result, we have parallel action, and there's underlying tension because there's always that threat Wolverine's consciousness could return to the future and leave the world in an even darker place."
• Bishop, like in the comics, is an actual time-traveler and aware of the changes to the timeline. This refers to the "Age of Apocalypse" comic, where he was the only one who could stop Apocalypse from changing history. This also sets up Apocalypse as an X-Men film antagonist.
• Though Cyclops and Jean Grey do not appear in this film, director Bryan Singer has assured fans that their absence will be addressed.
• The cameos of Cyclops (James Marsden) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) were so tightly guarded that the actors as well as director Bryan Singer outright lied about their appearance in the movie to keep their return a surprise.
• In the Days of Future Past storyline from the comics, people were divided into three classes indicated by a single letter: baseline humans (H), anomalous humans (A), and mutants (M). Wolverine mentions anomalous humans in the film as humans who carry the potential to have mutant offspring, and were targeted by the Sentinels alongside mutants. In the comics, however, they were simply forbidden to breed.