12 Movies That Were Ruined By One Dumb Decision

12. Reducing Phoenix To A Subplot - X-Men: The Last Stand

After spending two films slowly building character interactions and setting up its world's politics, X-Men looked ready to dive head first into the Dark Phoenix Saga. The franchise's biggest storyline, in print it saw Jean Grey unlock her full potential thanks to the Phoenix entity, leading to the loss of billions of lives and ultimately her death. On screen it's a different story, with Jean an almost ethereal presence who bumps off characters for shock value until she's anti-climatically killed.

Bryan Singer, director of the first two movies, left production early on in The Last Stand, leading to Brett Ratner taking his place. Neither knowing or caring about the comic mythos, Ratner left the story and its faithfulness to the writers, who were under immense pressure from Fox to drop the Phoenix storyline in favour of the much less complex idea of a mutant cure. In the end a compromise was made, with Phoenix's rampage remaining, but relegated to a subplot.

Ruining two movies worth of set-up in favour of pushing a painfully unsubtle story to the fore (and this is a series that blatantly parallelled itself with the Holocaust), Fox forcing the writers to keep things as broad as possible led to something that even the franchise itself has since disowned; Days Of Future Past wrote all of the movie's events out of history.