In the last few years, Bryan Singer has made it quite obvious that he is not a fan of Brett Ratner's edition to the X-Men franchise, The Last Stand. So it comes as no surprise that the film that brought him back to the mutants is one that completely goes against any plot that X-Men 3 put into place and sees him literally rewriting the story that had unfolded in the third instalment.
Ratner's The Last Stand was dark, (really dark in terms of Marvel), and Singer has voiced frequently that not only would he have 'done things a little differently' but he certainly wouldn't have had so many characters written off.
Now, fans would have been pretty outraged if he just did a remake of X3 with a completely different plot (even though they weren't too pleased with it to begin with) but Singer saw a way around this obstacle. Using the comic 'Days Of Future Past' as a basis for his script, he had the characters themselves do his dirty work, and had them go back in time to change their future, technically rendering The Last Stand as, well, non-existent in the X-Men universe. Well played, Singer, well played.
