8 Scrapped Movie Plots That Turned Up In Other Films

3. The Missing Link Between Sabertooths

Remember the ambiguous fate of Sabertooth in the first X-Men? After a blast from Cyclops, he fell off the Statue of Liberty and landed on a boat. Sabertooth could surely survive that, right? So how come he never showed up in any of the other X-Men films, save for the prequel, X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Well, as it turns out, in early drafts of X2: X-Men United, Sabertooth was going to rematch against arch-nemesis Wolvie, in a way you might not have expected.

Originally the villain of X2, Colonel Stryker, would have had Sabertooth as his personal assistant/bodyguard, not Deathstrike. But going even further, we would have discovered that Stryker had cloned Sabertooth several times, and that the one we saw in X1, who was much more primal, was one of the clones who Magneto was, like, renting from Stryker or something. The Sabertooth meant to appear in X2 would be the real Sabertooth, who had been around for as long as Logan, and therefore was much more experienced and refined. In other words, this Sabertooth would have given Wolverine a better run for his money in X2.

As the script developed the filmmakers ditched this idea to instead dig up another villain from Wolverine’s rogues gallery and we got Deathstrike, which turned out to be one of the standouts of that film.

The idea of the more matured Sabertooth was then brought forward again and utilized in the first standalone Wolverine film. So if you ever wondered why those two versions of the character were so radically different, there’s your answer.