10 Movie Easter Eggs Added At The Last Minute

10. Stan Lee - X-Men

The Easter Egg

Though a Stan Lee cameo barely qualifies as an Easter egg these days given that everyone knows who he is, back in the year 2000 things were quite different, and Lee was still mostly revered only in the circle of cult fandom.

And so, it flew over the heads of more casual audience members that Stan the Man made one of his first movie cameos in the original X-Men, appearing roughly half-way through the film as a hot dog vendor who witnesses Senator Kelly (Bruce Davison) washing up ashore.

The Story

But Lee's first major Marvel cameo almost never happened, as revealed by the film's co-writer and executive producer Tom DeSanto following Lee's death last year.

DeSanto, Bryan Singer and co. were adamant that Lee would make a cameo appearance in X-Men, but after everything had been organised, Lee actually tried to drop out at the last minute, having received pressure from Marvel executives not to film the scene.

DeSanto told Lee, "Stan, you are Marvel. You have to be in this movie", and when Lee decided that he didn't want to travel to Vancouver for filming, DeSanto even arranged for the scene to be filmed in Malibu instead.

Seemingly out of excuses, Lee relented and filmed the cameo, and then stuck around for a while to hang out with the cast and crew. And like that, history was made - but only barely.