Opinions vary about the problems with X-Men: Apocalypse, but it’s no secret that the movie had problems. Even a die-hard X-Men fan like me will cop to having felt some disappointment about it. One of the biggest disappointments, at least for me, was that Jubilee barely appeared in the movie at all. While the other teenage mutants—Kurt, Scott, and Jean—travel together to save the adult X-Men, who’ve been taken captive by Stryker, Jubilee got left behind … I’ve already written at length about why I think that she should have come along for that scene, and many others.
In the early marketing for the movie, it seemed like Jubilee was supposed to be part of Kurt, Scott, and Jean’s clique. Even in the final version of the movie, we did see the four of them together in a couple of scenes, but she doesn’t get many lines, she doesn’t get to use her powers, and she doesn’t get to really establish herself as part of the group compared to the other three characters. These deleted scenes prove that she should have been part of that group all along.
The deleted scene that I’ve embedded up top is a three-minute musical montage of Jubilee, Kurt, Scott and Jean all going to a local mall together. It’s set to “Safety Dance,” the 1982 hit from Men Without Hats, and it’s slow-paced and dreamlike. In contrast to the rest of the movie, this scene bursts with positivity and warmth. It’s clear that mutants go to the mall near Xavier’s school all the time, so Kurt finally gets to experience walking around without being seen as unusual. The scene could have served as Apocalypse‘s beacon of hope—an example of how growing up in a diverse space can help normalize and humanize the “other,” and instead recast mutants as part of the spectrum of variety that encompasses human experience.
Without the scene, X-Men: Apocalypse suffers from a lack of joy and forward-thinking hope—precisely the attitude that Jubilee embodies. Personally, I think the whole movie could have used more of her spirit, even beyond this one clip. She does appear in at least one other deleted scene—a classroom scene—but it’s not as striking to me as this mall scene, since it’s a bit of a throwaway moment. Here it is, though:
X-Men Apocalypse Extended Scene:
“The Once and Future King”#XMen #XMenApocalypse pic.twitter.com/wPkFWalrU3— james mcavoy taylor (@DAVIDPERCEVALS) September 11, 2016
There are several other deleted scenes on @DAVIDPERCEVALS’s Twitter account, so you might want to check them out before some 20th Century Fox executive finds them and requests their removal. None of the other deleted scenes really wowed me, though, so I can understand why they didn’t end up in the final version.
I can also understand, somewhat, why the mall scene didn’t necessarily end up in the final movie. In terms of timing, it would have ended up happening right before yet another lengthy montage set to an ’80s song—the Quicksilver scene, in which he saves every character in the mansion right before Stryker’s forces blow the building up, all while the strains of “Sweet Dreams” play in the background. It would have felt weird to put this scene right before that other scene. That’s too many ’80s music montages in a row, but maybe it would have worked to combine the two montages in some way, juxtaposing the hope of one scene with the tragedy of the other.
Personally, I think a stronger version of X-Men: Apocalypse would have found a way to include a little bit more of the spirit of this scene, as opposed to focusing on the older characters, whose stories we’ve already seen so many times. How many times can we reset Magneto and Xavier’s relationship back to zero, then watch them replay the same conflicts with one another yet again? But that’s just not the X-Men story that we got, and it’s entirely possible that we’ll never get it, given that the current creative team leaves scenes like this one on the cutting room floor.
(via Independent, image via screencap)
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