With just about two weeks to go, X-Men: Apocalypse is drawing closer to its highly-anticipated release date. Whether or not it’s actually a good movie… well, maybe you should just look at the reviews. But, as it is widely considered the conclusion of a trilogy that began with X-Men: First Class, interest in Apocalypse is prevalent nevertheless. One reason for that is the introduction of new mutants, particularly teenage boy crush Olivia Munn, who stars as Psylocke. Turns out that Munn or Psylocke nearly didn’t make it into the Apocalypse script.
In a recent interview with Cinema Blend, writer-producer Simon Kinberg revealed that early drafts of X-Men: Apocalypse only included three Horsemen. These “Horsemen” are a group of incredibly powerful mutants whom the film’s eponymous villain seeks to recruit as personal bodyguards/soldiers. Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Storm (Alexandra Shipp) and Angel (Ben Hardy) were all apart of the original plan, but what about Munn’s Psylocke? After all, isn’t the expression the “Four Horsemen”? Well, there was initially another member of the gang, but he was supposed to be a surprise. Here’s what Kinberg said:
[O]riginally 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 – pretty late in the process – said, ‘He’s not really a Horseman – he’s not doing anything in the third act of the movie.’
By now you may have figured out that Psylocke was designated as the fourth Horseman, but why her of all people mutants? Once Kinberg and director Bryan Singer decided to nix Xavier as the final Horseman, the pair turned their attention to a list of various Horsemen from the past. They decided that Psylocke was the most intriguing character. Fate would have it that Munn was still fresh in Kinberg’s mind, as she had rejected Deadpool’s girlfriend role just a couple weeks earlier.
“I said, ‘You know, Olivia Munn could be an interesting Psylocke,’ so we went on the internet and Googled her images,” explained Kinberg. “And one of the first things that popped up was a piece of fan art of Olivia as Psylocke.”
So there you have it. Fans play a bigger role in filmmaking than you might think. And speaking of fan influence and the aforementioned Deadpool, a similar phenomenon led to Deadpool cameoing in his own Honest Trailer. Small world.
Catch Olivia Munn as Psylocke when X-Men: Apocalypse arrives in theaters May 27.
