We aren’t that far removed from the X-Men franchise being one of the strongest in Hollywood. Following X-Men: Days of Future Past, there was a creative momentum that would soon be realized by Deadpool and Logan. However, the tanking of X-Men: Apocalypse threw a spanner in the works, and the whole thing finally fell apart with Dark Phoenix. But that period when things were back on a high saw a number of potential projects introduced, and one was apparently a story that would’ve centered on Beast and introduced a new Wolverine into the mix.
John Ottman, a longtime X-Men editor and Bryan Singer colleague, pitched a movie titled Fear the Beast that would have focused on Hank “Beast” McCoy, played by Nicholas Hoult. The script, written in a couple of weeks by Ottman’s assistant Byron Burton, would’ve drawn inspiration from John Carpenter’s The Thing, and followed Beast as he and another scientist developed a serum to control his mutant ability to turn furry and blue. When the scientist tests the serum and begins to rage out of control within an Inuit community, Beast must go and put a stop to it, which is when he encounters a young Wolverine. Turns out the entire situation is being manipulated by the X-Men villain Mister Sinister.
“We wanted to have the tenor of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ where you are in this inhospitable environment,” said Ottman.
“The idea was we would have Sinister as this multi-film villain orchestrating things,” said Burton. “We wrote a late-’80s outline of an Omega Red film where the idea is Sinister is testing the X-Men.”
Of course, the project never got going. Dark Phoenix director and longtime writer/producer Simon Kinberg was developing his own reintroduction of Wolverine and didn’t want to read Burton’s screenplay for fear of influence. Kinberg never got to do whatever idea he had, either. Logan effectively wrote that plan off.
This actually sounds pretty cool, but it never would’ve been a movie. Ever. Fortunately, you can now read Burton’s screenplay right here and get a glimpse at what might’ve been. [THR]
