X-Men 3 Tops Memorial Day Box Office
Plus, inside info on the surprise ending and talk about X4.
Warning: Spoilers
X-Men: The Last Stand is now the biggest grossing movie for a Memorial Day weekend, taking in more than $196 million in just four days. That beats out The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Shrek 2. It's the fourth highest movie opening of all time.
Chances are it could make $250 million by summer's end, even with competition from Superman Returns. Few challengers will crop up for over a month. The film cost $210 million to make.
However, Marvel Studios exec Avi Arad told Variety that X4 will have to wait until the Wolverine and Magneto movies are made.
"A big second frame decline is thus likely," Variety says. "But with nearly $200 million in domestic grosses by next weekend a virtual lock, Fox execs won't be shedding too many tears.
"More likely, they'll be talking to their partners at Marvel about the next step for the franchise, since 'Last Stand' was supposed to be the final film in a trilogy."
"The first reaction, which we should discard, is here comes 'X-Men 4,'" said Arad. "We're working on 'Wolverine,' which is definitely a continuation [Editor's note: not a prequel, as has been suggested], and we have a very interesting script about a young Magneto."
Meanwhile, for fans who stayed through the end-credits of the film, here's more information on the surprise at the end (Warning: Spoilers:
Highlight over the text below to read on:
Director Brett Ratner told Superhero Hype how it came to be that Professor X would survive the Phoenix' attack and transfer his consciousness to Moira MacTaggert’s patient glimpsed at the beginning of the film.
"Yeah, the studio didn't even know I did it," Ratner told Superhero Hype. "I didn't even put it on the schedule. I shot in between set-ups, just went over there and shot it, and then I showed it to the studio and they went 'Oh My God, we love that!' because it keeps Xavier. Look, in the last one, Jean Grey died and then I saw her on the first day of shooting X3, so nobody dies in these movies? What the hell are they talking about?"
"I was aware of three endings for this movie, all under different circumstances," confirmed Patrick Stewart when asked about it. "There was the ending in the script, which we all saw. There was a scene, which I shot in the hospital bed, in the first days of filming. It never appeared on paper, there was no call for it, it was never documented, this scene. It never got shot. In other words, we sneaked it in after lunch one day and there were not many people on the set. It was a cut-down crew, and it was all done very hurriedly because they stuck a beard on me over lunch and we shot it. Then Ian [McKellen] called me a few weeks ago and said, 'You won't believe this but they're coming to London and they're going to shoot the final scene of the movie,' which is of course is of interest to me. He said, 'I'm playing chess' and of course I wanted to know, 'Who with?' and he said, 'They won't tell me' but of course there's no one there at all. Last night, when I sat down to watch the movie for the first time I had no idea how this was going to be resolved. We were all on our feet leaving during the credits when someone from Fox said, 'You should sit down. It's not over yet.' I couldn't imagine what that meant and then sure enough, there was this little hospital scene, which is hinted at in the video I play in the class, about a man who had terminal cancer and you can transfer somebody's consciousness into him. Something I missed last night is that Olivia Williams, who plays Moira [McTaggert], is in the memorial scene. I missed her, but in fact she is."