MONTREAL— One of the biggest movies to shoot in Montreal in years is returning for reshoots in the next few weeks.
Director Bryan Singer and some of the cast and crew of X-Men: Days of Future Past will be back in town before Christmas to shoot some extra scenes for the film, which is the second-most expensive movie ever produced by Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox, behind only Avatar.
Quebec film commissioner Hans Fraikin met with executives at Fox in Los Angeles last week and they confirmed the production is returning to Montreal.
“A couple of weeks is a big reshoot,” said Fraikin, who was in L.A. for the American Film Market, drumming up business for Montreal.
But there is no reason to read into this news that there are any problems with the movie, Fraikin added.
“Not at all,” he said. “It happens all the time, especially with big pictures.”
Filming on the latest instalment in the X-Men franchise began in Montreal in mid-April and wrapped in late August. The film combines the two X-Men franchises — so it works as a sequel to both X-Men: The Last Stand from 2006 and X-Men: First Class from 2011. Many of the key X-Men characters will be travelling across time in this new flick, and so there will be young and old versions of the characters.
For example, Ian McKellen plays the older Magneto and Michael Fassbender plays the younger version of the character, while Patrick Stewart plays the older Charles Xavier and James McAvoy the younger one.
Splicing together the two series makes for a star-studded cast that also includes Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Shawn Ashmore, Daniel Cudmore and Ellen Page. It is set in the 1970s and 10 years in the future.
One of the more notable scenes was shot at city hall in the summer, with the building standing in for a major hotel in Paris, where the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. That was the treaty that officially ended the Vietnam War for the United States.
Fraikin also confirmed he is in talks with Fox to attempt to persuade the Hollywood studio to shoot the sequel to Independence Day in Montreal. If Fox decides to do it here, they would likely shoot in 2015. The factor playing in Montreal’s favour is that like the original Independence Day, the film will be directed by German-born filmmaker Roland Emmerich, who has already made two major movies in our city, The Day After Tomorrow and White House Down.
“Roland wants to do it in Montreal,” Fraikin said. “He loves the city. He had a great time here. It would be really cool for me because it was one of the first films I released with 20th Century Fox.”
Fraikin was in charge of distribution in Southeast Asia for Fox in the mid- to late-’90s.
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hmmmmm... Singer usually doesn't do big reshoots like this unless he's changing the end of the film (ala X2)