Where to watch X-Men: First Class (2011)

Trivia & production notes

• A planned Magneto spin-off was conceived as a Holocaust story set between 1939 and 1955, with the character surviving Auschwitz and later encountering Xavier during a camp liberation, only to become enemies through Magneto's quest for vengeance against Nazi war criminals.
• The Magneto film was cancelled due to the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike and other production factors, with plans to shoot in Australia for a 2009 release.
• Bryan Singer was originally hired to direct X-Men: First Class in October 2009 but left the director role in March 2010 due to his commitment to a Jack the Giant Killer adaptation, transitioning to producer instead.
• Matthew Vaughn was initially not considered for the director position because he had previously worked on X-Men: The Last Stand before backing out, but Kinberg decided to contact him after seeing Kick-Ass.
• Matthew Vaughn described his vision for the film as combining three of his dream projects simultaneously: an X-Men movie, a James Bond-style film, and a political thriller in the vein of John Frankenheimer.
• An action scene set in a dream sequence with revolving rooms was scrapped after Inception's release to avoid similarity.
• The Writers Guild of America arbitration credited screenwriter Sheldon Turner with the film's story despite Bryan Singer denying he used Turner's Magneto script as inspiration, while other writers' contributions went uncredited.
• Matthew Vaughn rewrote the script alongside Jane Goldman, cutting a planned love triangle between Xavier, Magneto, and Moira MacTaggert and removing the character of Sunspot due to budget and time constraints.
• Producer Simon Kinberg suggested adapting the X-Men: First Class comic series, but the filmmakers deliberately avoided following the comics closely, feeling they were too similar to Twilight and John Hughes films.
• The final film incorporated radiation as a cause of genetic mutation, reviving a central concept from the comics that had been largely abandoned in previous X-Men film scripts in favor of attributing mutation to evolution and natural selection.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article X-Men: First Class, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.