X-Men: Apocalypse Writer Reveals Who Psylocke Replaced As A Member Of The Four Horsemen

 

X-Men: Apocalypse is a movie with a very long list of characters, but it very nearly had one less mutant. Talking to Cinema Blend in a recent interview, producer and writer Simon Kinberg confirmed that an earlier version of the script had James McAvoy’s Professor X recruited by En Sabah Nur to join Angel, Magneto, and Storm.

He said “The one person we didn’t know was Psylocke, and the reason why is because originally in the script we sort of… I don’t know why we made this decision, but we knew that Professor X was abducted in the middle of the movie, and we thought that almost counted as a fourth Horseman. And so that’s the way we constructed the original draft of the script. There wasn’t going to be a fourth one. The ‘surprise’ was that Xavier was the fourth Horseman. And then when we were working on the script, Bryan and I at one particular point said, ‘He’s not really a Horseman – he’s not doing anything in the third act of the movie. We started talking about who that would be, and just literally looked at the list of different Horsemen over the history of the comics, and Psylocke was the one we thought was the most intriguing. And, ironically, or as fate would have it, I had just met with Olivia Munn about Deadpool – like a week or two before. And Bryan and I were up in Montreal, and I said, ‘You know, Olivia Munn could be an interesting Psylocke,’ so we went on the internet and Googled her images. And one of the first things that popped up was a piece of fan art of Olivia as Psylocke”

A franchise like X-Force would arguably be better suited to exploring that, but with that movie likely taking place in the present day and X-Men: Apocalypse set in the 1980s, that could be a problem. Either way, Professor X becoming a member of the Four Horsemen would have been pretty disappointing, so the fact that Singer and Kinberg changed their minds is definitely a relief.