Logan: Director James Mangold Discusses The Westchester Incident

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for the film Logan.

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Logan was a film that had a lot of dark specters hanging around it. Yes, this was set in a world where the X-Men existed, but it was a world that no longer had any mutants to speak of, save for Logan, Professor X, and a handful of others. For all intents and purposes, most mutants have been wiped out. 

Another specter came in the form of the Westchester incident. While the scene was never shown, it was briefly mentioned that it was the accidental work of an ailing Professor X, who somehow lost control and inadvertently killed a whole lot of people. 



Speaking with Coming Soon, director James Mangold mentioned that he had written the scene, and gave an explanation as to why they didn’t actually put it in the film.

“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—what’s that?”

We have to say, it was an approach that worked remarkably well. Going into Logan, I’m not sure a lot of audiences were going for pure spectacle. This was a film meant more as a love letter to the Wolverine than to the X-Men. As such, going for big and bombastic right upfront would have felt a bit disingenuous.

And that’s not even to say Logan got off to a slow start. It had an action scene of its own — one that felt more in line with the low point in which Logan found himself in his life.

What do you think? was it a good choice for Mangold to cut out that scene? Let us know your thoughts down below!

Logan is in theaters now!

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SOURCE: Coming Soon

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