Fans of supervillain Apocalypse know that he is always followed by his Four Horsemen. In the film X-Men: Apocalypse, En Sabah Nur is also followed by four mutants to serve him as he attempts to conquer the world. His Four Horsemen in the film are Magneto, Storm, Archangel, and Psylocke. These were very drastic changes from page to screen. Magneto and Archangel are understood, but Storm and Psylocke are very unique and bold choices for mutants to join Apocalypse. Turns out that the producers of X-Men: Apocalypse had even a bolder choice in the early script stages of the film.
During an interview, producer Simon Kinberg confirmed that we almost had a completely different Horseman. Early drafts of the film actually had Professor Xavier switching sides and actually working with Magneto for Apocalypse.
“The one person we didn’t know was Psylocke, and the reason why is because originally 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.’”
Ultimately it was decided to include Psylocke instead of Professor Xavier, but that would have been an interesting and bold choice. In the comics, Professor X technically played the role of villain when his dark side helped create supervillain Onslaught, but for the most part, he has always been the good guy. We might have seen a totally different movie with Professor X as the bad guy.
X-Men: Apocalypse arrives in theaters May 27th.
Source: CinemaBlend
