Inception causes last minute changes to X-Men: First Class

Matthew Vaughn has been hard at work on pre-production for X-Men: First Class since he signed on to direct in May, and with test shots beginning tomorrow at Pinewood Studios in London Vaughn will be mentally preparing himself for a mutant-filled 4-5 month shoot.

The last thing Vaughn and any director would want to do on the eve of filming would be to discover a movie currently ripping up the box office contains similar elements to the film you are about to spend the next year working on, but that’s what happened when the director took a trip to see Christopher Nolan’s Inception this weekend.

From Hero Complex:

“I saw ‘Inception,’ which I loved,” Vaughn said Monday. “But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards.”

The jettisoned sequence was a sort of dream-space combat, according to Vaughn; that reminded me of “psi war” scenes from “The Uncanny X-Men” No. 117 way back in 1979, but the filmmaker said for the film the fight involving Professor X (James McAvoy) and some other mutants involved spinning rooms and other physics-bending imagery — visions that he felt drifted too close to signature moments in “Inception,” which has now piled up $363 million in worldwide box office and garnered some of the strongest reviews of any 2010 release.

Great minds think alike I suppose. Being the most powerful telepath in the world Charles Xavier may have been having mind battles with the villain, or the villain may have been projecting images into the minds of the X-Men. It would have been a cool sequence, so it is a shame they have had to remove it. Hopefully they come up with something equally cool to replace it.

X-Men: First Class, which will be released June 3rd 2011, also stars Michael Fassbender as Magneto, Alice Eve as Emma Frost, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique. Kevin Bacon will be taking on the bad guy role, although his character has yet to be revealed.