WonderCon: No Mention of Bryan Singer at ‘X-Men’ Panel

Director Bryan Singer was absent on Saturday during Fox’s WonderCon presentation of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Writer-producer Simon Kinberg stepped in to replace the filmmaker, who has dropped out of several events due to a media storm surrounding allegations of sexually abusing a 17-year-old boy.

Despite unintended innuendo from host Ralph Garman with lines such as “there’s a lot to talk about,” “this is a tricky subject for movies” and “there’s a lot of questions about this film,” Fox played its panel very straight with not a single mention of the filmmaker.

Not that most of the crowd seemed to care. Fans were excited to see anything, and Fox did show off an extended sequence from the movie’s opening on a big screen, leading to the trailer, which has only been seen online.

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Kinberg talked about movie rules for time travel, revealed how James Cameron — who made the time-traveling Terminator movies — gave the production advice and scientific evidence to study, and said how the movie shot for six weeks with the cast of the original X-Men (Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan and Halle Berry) and then the bulk of the shoot with the cast of X-Men: First Class. (Only in one scene did both casts interact.)

The movie adapts an acclaimed and classic story from the comics in which X-Men characters from a postapocalyptic future overrun by mutant-hunting robots travel back in time to right wrongs.

“This and the Dark Phoenix are two most famous stories. We could have done better with the Dark Phoenix,” Kinberg said, referring to the money-making but much-maligned X-Men Last Stand, which tried to adapt that storyline. “This is our attempt to right the wrongs of the past,” he said.

Fox also had book fans squealing with its Maze Runner presentation, previewed a well-received sequence from Secret Service (an adaptation of a Mark Millar comic) and showed off a scene from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

How to Train Your Dragon 2, meanwhile, had some executives and members of the press surprised at how much admiration and anticipation there is for the dragon-centric animated feature.