If you’re typically active in putting pre-orders on upcoming Blu-Ray releases, here’s one reason to hold off on X-Men: Days of Future Past. The blockbuster is bowing on home media this October, but it has been confirmed that what Fox Home Entertainment is sending our way then is just a theatrical cut of the film. And sure, the theatrical version is what is currently sitting pretty with 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, but that’s not the only disc that Fox will be releasing.
Building off franchise producer Lauren Donner Shuller’s comments last month that a director’s cut would eventually see shelves this year, Fox’s EVP of Marketing Communications, James Finn, has clarified that an ‘extended’ version of the film is one release Fox is currently working on:
@ConnorBlackburn @DOFPXmen theatrical. Extended is coming next year.
— James Finn (@FinnJ) August 3, 2014
So, real comic-book fans might have good reason to delay picking up Days of Future Past. What could that extended cut include, you may ask? When one considers that Days of Future Past utilizes dozens of iconic characters from the X-Men comics, the answer is ‘a hell of a lot.’
For example, Anna Paquin’s Rogue was cut from the theatrical version of the movie, but that character had two key scenes in Days of Future Past. In one, the mutant absorbed Kitty Pryde’s time-travel powers after Kitty was grievously injured by Wolverine, in order to help the latter stay in the past long enough to prevent Sentinels from wiping out mutantkind. There was also a whole other plot in the dystopian future setting of Days of Future Past in which Professor X, Magneto, and Iceman embarking on a mission to rescue Rogue from the Sentinels. Expect both of those scenes in an extended cut. And just because this extended cut is on its way, don’t count out the director’s cut Shuller previously teased. The producer recently updated us with this tweet:
@SheenaTylor2 @BryanSinger @Kinberg @ShuDonner @20thcenturyfox yes ! Coming later this year. — Lauren Shuler Donner (@ShuDonner) June 26, 2014
So there you have it. If both Shuler Donner and Finn are on the same page, that means we can expect three different Blu-Ray releases for X-Men: Days of Future Past – a theatrical on October 14th (or September 23rd digitally), a director’s cut later this year and an extended one sometime next year.
Which one will you be picking up?