Details on a Tragic Professor X Flashback That Was Cut From LOGAN
If you haven't seen Logan yet, you might not want to read this article because it contains spoilers involving plot details that revolve around Charles Xavier.
There is a whole backstory that revolves around Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Professor X (Patrick Stewart), and what happened to all of all the mutants. In the Old Man Logan comic, it was Wolverine who was responsible for the deaths of the mutants. In this movie, we learn that Professor X caused the deaths of the mutants.
It's revealed that there was a terrible incident in Westchester, New York, which is the home of the X-Mansion and Xavier's School for Gifted Mutants. We learn from the villain Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) that the government classifies Xavier's brain as a weapon of mass destruction. Later on we hear a news broadcast on the radio talking about how the incident at the casino in Oklahoma was similar to one that happened Westchester, which injured 600 people and left several members of the X-Men team and mutant students dead. This was something that Logan was trying to hide from Xavier.
Early drafts of the script actually featured flashbacks to what happened with Professor X in Westchester. It was ultimately cut and never shot, and screenwriter Michael Green explained why in an interview with THR saying:
"It actually hits home a lot harder than the versions that really painted out specifically the flashback. Of course there are versions we wrote that were never filmed with the actual flashback of what happened, but I’ve found the experience of watching it is far more poignant to just know that it was something really regrettable and it was bad and most likely, friends were lost. Or maybe it was people we didn't know."
Director James Mangold added:
"I wanted to make a movie less about information and more about character."
As interesting as it would have been to see these flashbacks, I like that they didn't include them. I like that the audience gets to use their imagination about what happened with that incident. I think it seemed pretty clear that Xavier had a crazy powerful seizure that wiped them all out on accident, but who knows, it could've been something completely different! There could've been more too it than that. Green is actually looking forward to reading all of the fan theories about what happened:
"Nothing will be better than going online and reading fan theories about what happened at the end because I want to hear that version. I know what I think happened, I even know what did happen, but it doesn’t matter, because what’s canonized here is the emotional effect of things."
There is a specific event that was all planned out, but it doesn't sound like we'll find out what it was anytime soon. Green says there are no plans to officially reveal the hidden backstory. Hopefully one day someone will reveal what that backstory is, but in the meantime, what do you all think the incident was?