X-Men Origins: Magneto Was Planned as a Nazi-Hunting Spy Thriller Before Fox Folded It Into First Class

Two of the most memorable moments in X-Men: First Class are the scenes where Michael Fassbender's Magneto hunts down Nazi war criminals like he's in his own twisted James Bond movie, and ever since that film came out, many fans have wanted to see an entire movie built around that idea. It turns out that was actually the original plan, and it was meant to be made right after X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Here is what X-Men Origins: Magneto would have been about, and how it ended up getting folded into First Class instead of released on its own.

The Film Opens at a Present Day Auschwitz Ceremony

The story opens in the present day in Poland at a somber 60th anniversary ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz. An older but deeply angry Magneto, played by Ian McKellen, slips away from the crowd and walks to the camp's massive rusty gate. As he stares at it, his rage causes the metal to screech and bend, which takes the story back to the opening scene of the original X-Men film, where a 14-year-old Erik is separated from his mother.

Young Erik Is Experimented on by Dr. Kleinmine

After being knocked unconscious, Erik is taken to a laboratory where he meets Dr. Kleinmine, who has been experimenting on other prisoners. Kleinmine demands to know how Erik was able to bend the gate, but Erik, still in shock, refuses to cooperate as Kleinmine promises to find out exactly what Erik is.

Time then jumps forward to show Erik has been living in the camp for a while and has befriended a Gypsy girl named Magda. As the Soviets advance to liberate the camps, SS officer Hans Decker orders one of his men to execute a group of prisoners. Erik jams the guard's gun and crunches the guard's own helmet down onto his head, and in the chaos of the Russian liberation, Erik and Magda escape together, hand in hand.

Erik Loses His Family in Ukraine After a Public Killing

The story jumps ahead about ten years to Erik living in Ukraine, working as a construction laborer. He is now married to Magda and they have a six-year-old daughter, and Erik has been hiding his magnetic abilities from the world. When he visits a local pub and recognizes an Auschwitz guard who had once brutally beaten prisoners, Erik confronts him and pulls up his sleeve to reveal his tattooed camp number. The guard only mocks him and pulls a pistol.

In a surge of fear and rage, Erik summons a steak knife from a nearby table and sends it flying like a missile into the guard's back, killing him. Horrified by what he has done, Erik flees, but the townspeople brand him a warlock and form a lynch mob. When he runs back to his house he finds the mob has already set it ablaze.

As the mob attacks him, Erik launches a metal pole through the air and knocks the ringleader unconscious, and the rest of the mob flees in terror. It's too late, though. The burning house collapses, killing Magda and Erik's daughter, and the sequence ends with Erik sobbing in the ashes, clutching his daughter's soot covered teddy bear.

Erik Becomes a Nazi Hunter From Paris to Buenos Aires

Eleven months later, Erik travels to Paris and meets a Nazi hunter who is also an Auschwitz survivor. That hunter warns Erik that spending his life hunting down the men responsible for the Holocaust will eventually destroy him. Erik ignores the warning and secretly steals files on several escaped Nazis, including Dr. Kleinmine, the man who experimented on him as a child.

The trail leads Erik to Buenos Aires, where he starts hunting down Nazis who fled to South America. After he captures a former Nazi financier, Erik draws the attention of CIA agent Owen Graves, who offers him a deal: the CIA will help Erik find the men on his list if he helps them eliminate Nazis the agency cannot officially touch.

The CIA Sends Erik After Dr. Kleinmine and Hans Decker

Erik tells Graves he wants information on Kleinmine and on Hans Decker, the SS officer who ordered prisoners gunned down on the eve of the Soviet liberation. Graves tells him Kleinmine is dead, but offers Decker's whereabouts if Erik cooperates. Erik is sent to Argentina to track down a former concentration camp doctor now living under an alias, but when Erik finds him, the doctor realizes what Erik is capable of and kills himself rather than face him.

Searching the doctor's office, Erik finds evidence leading to Decker, who he tracks to a massive estate serving as headquarters for a highly secure, clandestine neo-Nazi network still running wartime operations. Decker is there supervising a weapons shipment, so Erik triggers a crate of hand grenades and sets off a series of massive explosions. Decker escapes by helicopter during the chaos, but after taking out the guards, Erik finds an underground bunker with a stash of fake passports used to give escaped Nazis new identities, including one for Dr. Kleinmine, revealing he is still alive.

In Washington, a CIA deputy director lies to a young Senator Kelly's subcommittee, denying any knowledge of CIA-backed vigilantes, then privately orders Graves to stop Erik before he exposes their operation.

Erik Meets a Young Charles Xavier in Israel

Erik then travels to Israel and meets Charles Xavier, described as a charismatic, bald, 30-year-old mutant. Charles invites him to his institute and explains he is a telepath who was once diagnosed as schizophrenic before he learned to control the voices in his head. Most shocking to Erik, Charles' institute educates the children of Nazi guards and the children of survivors together, preaching forgiveness.

Erik strongly disagrees, arguing that evil must be fought rather than forgiven. Charles places a hand on Erik's shoulder and telepathically experiences his memories, including his time in the camps and Kleinmine's experiments on him, leaving Charles horrified. Charles reveals he was a photographer in the army and saw the death camps in Europe firsthand.

The institute is then attacked by two Egyptian tanks breaching the border. Erik grinds the first tank's wheel chain to a halt while Charles telepathically terrifies the second tank's soldiers into fleeing. Afterward, Charles shows Erik a prototype helmet, a precursor to Cerebro, meant to locate other mutants so they can comfort the afflicted. Erik's reply is one of the sharper lines from the script: "and afflict the comfortable."

Decker's Attack Destroys the Israeli Institute

Decker arrives in Israel with a team and explosives, planning to destroy Charles' institute. While the explosives are being planted, Decker corners Erik on a cliffside, but Erik's magnetic control is far superior. He bends Decker's own gun barrel back at his head, shoots the henchmen, then uses the metal in Decker's belt to bind him to his jeep. After interrogating Decker and learning Kleinmine is in Washington, D.C., Erik lets the jeep plunge off the cliff with Decker still attached.

The explosives detonate during this confrontation, decimating the institute, and Charles is left standing in the ruins. Both men then head to Washington in search of Kleinmine.

The Final Confrontation Happens in a Virginia Bunker

In Washington, Graves meets with Kleinmine, revealing that the CIA has been harboring and funding him to use his mutant DNA research to create the perfect soldier. After Erik and Charles's plane lands, they track Kleinmine to a secure bunker in Virginia and split up once inside. Erik soon realizes the bunker has been completely stripped of metal, and Kleinmine cackles from behind a thick glass partition before unleashing the twins, mutant super soldiers he engineered himself. With no metal to manipulate, the twins beat Erik badly.

In an adjacent lab, Charles finds dozens of mutant test subjects locked in glass cages filling with water to drown them, and he harnesses immense telepathic force to shatter the glass and rescue them. Back in the bunker, a bloodied Erik pulls the Star of David chain from around his neck, the only metal on him, and uses it to defeat the twins.

As Kleinmine panics and flees the compound by car, Erik pursues him on foot. Standing in the road, Erik forces the speeding car to swerve and crash into a tree, trapping the doctor inside. Kleinmine, pinned and bleeding, begs for help, but Erik walks away as the car is set ablaze, leaving his childhood torturer to burn to death.

The Ending Sets Up the School and Returns to the Present

Two weeks later, Charles and Erik walk across a sprawling plot of land in upstate New York. A realtor asks how big the facility will be, but Charles corrects her: a school, not a facility, a place of learning. Erik smiles and promises to help with construction, and the story then cuts to Erik's apartment, where he forges his iconic metal helmet and places it on his head.

The story then circles back to the present day Auschwitz ceremony, where an older Senator Kelly delivers a speech warning the public of the mutant threat. Professor X, now in his wheelchair, appears next to Magneto in the crowd, and Charles urges Erik to believe humanity can change. Magneto watches Kelly with cold, cynical eyes and says, "The more things stay the same, Charles. I shall see you soon, my friend." He tips his hat, turns away from Charles, and walks back to the Auschwitz gate, mangling the steel apart once again before vanishing into the crowd.

How Fox Cannibalized the Script Into X-Men: First Class

Fox hired screenwriter Sheldon Turner, who wrote The Longest Yard and would later co-write Up in the Air, to come up with an X-Men spin-off, and Turner chose Magneto, pitching the movie as essentially The Pianist meets X-Men. David Goyer, who had written Blade and Batman Begins and directed Blade Trinity, was brought on to direct, and for a while the movie genuinely seemed like it was going to happen.

Production was delayed by the 2007 to 2008 writers' strike, and by the time Hollywood returned to work, Fox had another X-Men Origins movie much further along in Wolverine. Goyer said that if X-Men Origins: Wolverine was successful, Magneto would be the next movie to go into production. But before Wolverine even reached theaters, an unfinished version of the entire film leaked online, complete with incomplete visual effects. As a result, Wolverine underperformed relative to Fox's expectations at the box office and was hammered by critics, leaving Fox not terribly enthusiastic about building out a whole series of X-Men Origins spin-offs.

Around the same time, producer Simon Kinberg had been reading X-Men: First Class comics and began pushing Fox toward a different kind of prequel. Kinberg did not want to directly adapt those comics, because he thought their teenage school setting felt too similar to films like Twilight and John Hughes movies. Instead, the idea became using First Class as a way of going back to the early days of the X-Men, introducing younger versions of familiar characters alongside a completely new group of mutants. That created an obvious overlap with Magneto: if Fox was already making a movie about the early days of Charles and Erik, there was not much reason left to make a separate Magneto origin story.

Rather than throw the script away completely, parts of it were folded into First Class. As producer Lauren Shuler Donner later put it, a lot of X-Men Origins: Magneto simply got incorporated into X-Men: First Class. In a way, the movie was not so much canceled as cannibalized, with Fox abandoning the idea of Magneto as the second chapter of an origin series and instead combining its best ideas with the story of Charles Xavier forming the X-Men, which is probably why those Nazi hunting scenes in First Class feel like they belong in an entirely different movie, because originally they did.

To direct First Class, Fox brought back X-Men and X2 director Bryan Singer, who wrote a treatment for the new film and denied using any of Sheldon Turner's Magneto script. The Writers Guild disagreed, however, and awarded Turner a credit for the film's story. Singer would later drop out of First Class altogether, with Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn taking over instead.

Would you have preferred to see this standalone Nazi-hunting Magneto film over the version of that story we got in X-Men: First Class?