MatthewVaughn-RatnerBomb

One of the things that must suck about making movies, other than a bad coke batch, is that it takes so long to get a movie from script to screen, you might see another movie happen upon one of your ideas while yours is still in production.  For Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn, who’s currently in pre-production on X-Men: First Class, seeing Inception was just such an experience. BOOM. Game changed.

“I saw ‘Inception,’ which I loved,” Vaughn said Monday. “But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards.”

The jettisoned sequence was a sort of dream-space combat, according to Vaughn.  The filmmaker said a fight involving Professor X (James McAvoy) and some other mutants was to going to be presented with spinning rooms and other physics-bending imagery — visions that he felt drifted too close to signature moments in “Inception.” [LA Times]

Having a director that actually thinks about this stuff is one of the reasons I’m cautiously optimistic for X-Men: First Class.  Brett Ratner wouldn’t clean Cheeto dust off a script, let alone rewrite it because of another movie.  (No word yet on Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, which, according to the synopsis, also takes place in a dream space of sorts).  As for Inception, it looks like Avatar‘s gamechanger status just got gamechanged.  Reached for comment, James Cameron said, “Without 3D or CGI cat monkeys??  Preposterous!” and shot a rare fabergé egg off the head of a high-priced European prostitute on the deck of his super yacht using a rifle he invented.  It’s how he unwinds.  You wouldn’t understand.