Executive Meddling / X-Men Film Series

• X-Men: The Last Stand:
  • Basically everything can be attributed to Fox not being willing to wait on Bryan Singer (he didn't have a full script, and went to accept the opportunity to make Superman Returns), then setting up a May 2006 release date with less than eighteen months to do the whole thing and no script. Matthew Vaughn was eventually alienated by family issues and the studio's restrictions, and the writers could not use the Phoenix saga as much as they wanted given the executives only preferred the cure story (thus Jean barely has anything to do in the second act). Some mutants were also vetoed to make them appear in X-Men Origins: Wolverine instead.
  • While it was originally said that the main reason Singer left for Superman Returns was that he was a huge fan of Superman, there was actually another aspect to why Singer left. After the second movie, the studio had to negotiate a new deal with him and his team, which was standard practice. However, the story goes that Tom Rothman (who reportedly insisted the X-Men movies would be failures and didn't like being proven wrong, to the point that Deadpool (2016) infamously and gleefully took shots at him after being greenlit years later after he had left the company) deliberately dragged it out — much to the frustration of everyone else involved. Fox's rivals at Warner Bros. noticed this and dangled the Superman movie in front of Singer in order to get him to jump ship. One story goes that when Rothman found out that Singer accepted the job to do Superman Returns, he ordered security to kick him off the lot, then had to bring him back onto the lot a week later so Singer could shoot the pilot to House.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine:
  • The Fox executives decided to take Deadpool, the Merc with the Mouth and possibly one of the most popular characters appearing in the movie, introduce him and then remove him quickly, and then sew his mouth shut. Because he would be too entertaining and take attention away from Wolverine or something (no-one knows the exact reason).
  • Director Gavin Hood and top Fox executive Tom Rothman reportedly had clashes over the film's creative direction. One infamous incident happened while Hood was off-set, at which point Rothman took it upon himself to have one of the sets repainted from Hood's original Darker and Edgier theme into something more Lighter and Softer.
  • Hood has also stated that the scripting process was a mess, and that portions of the screenplay were hastily rewritten as the movie was filming.
• X-Men: Apocalypse: Initially, Wolverine was going to have a larger role in the film. It would be him, and not Mystique, who shows up during the crisis and acts as the new field leader of the X-Men.
• Dark Phoenix:
  • Director Simon Kinberg wanted to re-film the original climactic sequence to add more X-Men to a scene that otherwise would have just had Professor X, Cyclops, and Phoenix in it, but Fox deemed it too expensive to rebuild the absolutely massive sets that they made for the sequence — thus resulting in the train sequence.
  • While Disney's acquisition of Fox did not affect the content within the film, it did adversely affect the movie's marketing campaign, as a number of positions were vacated and were replaced by temporary workers. Disney did attempt to give the movie a last-minute marketing push after the merger had been completed, but they did not spend as aggressively to promote the release. One insider says that the film's lone premiere in Los Angeles was done with an eye to controlling cost — a bit of economizing that annoyed the film's creative team.
• The New Mutants: Attempted, but ultimately subverted, when the film was developed at Fox. Similar to what happened with Suicide Squad, positive reception to a horror-heavy trailer led to the decision to reshoot the film to be more like what the trailer promised, which was said to be somewhat unrepresentative of the kind of movie it actually was; the initial cut of the film was suggested to be a Coming of Age Story with horror elements. However, due to Disney's purchase of Fox and a series of massive delays to the film, these changes never materialized. Eventually, it was revealed by Josh Boone that the version that he filmed and slightly re-shot was the movie that he set out to make, implying that the massive re-shoots that were planned were studio-enforced rather than director-driven. In other words, Disney — who were ironically feared to be meddlers themselves in the film — appears to have been more supportive of the film that was finished than Fox was.