LOGAN Director James Mangold Offers Insight on Why the Westchester Incident Was Cut From the Film

Earlier this week Logan screenwriter Michael Green revealed that there was originally supposed to be a flashback scene giving Professor X's tragic backstory with an event that became known as the Westchester Incident. The scene ended up being cut so that the story would focus more on the characters. Director James Mangold recently did an interview with Coming Soon and explained why it was ultimately cut and how it would have fit into the film. In case you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm going to place a spoiler warning here. 

As I previously explained, 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.

Mangold revealed that the scene that showed this event was originally planned to be the opening scene in the movie, but he didn't want it to overpower the rest of the story. He explained: 

"Yeah, I wrote that scene. I wrote it, and at one point, it was even the first scene in the movie... It also made the movie about that. It was really interesting. It suddenly made the movie about X-Men dying, as opposed to allowing the movie to be a kind of unwinding onion, like allowing you to kind of enter the story and go, 'Where is this going?' It was so large and loomed so large, and I felt like it also was still falling into the formula of the movies, with the big opener, that is setting up the mythology first. I thought, 'What if we do an opener that leans into character first? Actually underplay those things?' Let them just feel like it’s more like a normal thing, like it’s happened. And instead of underlining it, yeah. Just let it live in the background of all these characters."

Again, it feels like deleting the scene was the right decision. I like how the how history just kind of loomed in the background of the story as we slowly learned what had happened and how this tragic unexpected accident affected them and how it weighed on their souls and influenced their decisions. That was the smart way to do it.

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