An X-Men Beast spin-off movie was almost made

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is currently not doing so great in the box office, and it's likely that not much could have saved its commercial performance.

But we nearly had a very different X-Men movie on our hands, as an initial script for a Beast spin-off was written around the same time.

Back in 2016 while he was working on Apocalypse, X-Men editor and composer John Ottman was approached by his assistant and aspiring screenwriter Byron Burton to write a Beast-focused movie – and he gave Burton the go-ahead.

"I said, 'Knock yourself out, but just know there's a 95 percent chance no one is ever going to make this'," Ottman told The Hollywood Reporter.

But Ottman was so impressed by the finished product that he agreed to develop the script, even planning appearances for X-Men characters including Professor X and Wolverine.

The film would have been set in the late 1980s and saw the blue-furred X-Man, played by Nicholas Hoult, trying to keep his mutation in check with a special serum introduced in 2014's Days of Future Past.

The script sees Hank help a scientist with a similar mutation, but things go very wrong when the man escapes and begins terrorising an Inuit village.

Hank then teams up with Wolverine to take him down, before the end of the film reveals that villain Mr. Sinister has been watching everything unfold.

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"The idea was we would have Sinister as this multi-film villain orchestrating things," Burton explained. "We wrote a late-'80s outline of an Omega Red film where the idea is Sinister is testing the X-Men."

However, sadly the film never managed to get beyond the script stage. Director Simon Kinberg, who was working onDark Phoenix at the time, declined to read the script so he wasn't influenced by it.

Ottman and Burton have now made the initial script public on The Hollywood Reporter here just for fan enjoyment – although they've pointed out it's still an early draft and the finished film may have looked different.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is out now.

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Susannah Alexander

Reporter & Sub-Editor, Digital Spy Susannah is a freelance writer and sub-editor, specialising in the entertainment industry. She graduated in 2014, with a BA in English and American Literature and Creative Writing, and an MA in Creative Producing.  She’s been writing for Digital Spy ever since, after first getting involved through work experience, and has written hundreds of stories for the site on a range of topics, from The Sims to Doctor Who.  Susannah has also written for Reveal Magazine.  Her special interests are soaps (her Mastermind subject would be 2000s Coronation Street), Marvel and Star Wars. She can also quote far too many lines from Friends and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.