This 'X-Men: Apocalypse' Deleted Scene Is A Mutant Mall Montage

In a summer filled with high profile duds, X-Men: Apocalypse reigns supreme. At least Independence Day: Resurgence was audacious and insane and totally bonkers. At least Suicide Squad was bad in ways that generate great conversations. Bryan Singer's fourth X-Men movie, and the eighth film in the franchise overall, is the kind of movie that takes two and a half hours of your time and exits your brain while you're still watching it. It's the kind of bad movie that doesn't even have the decency to leave an impact.

Although the Blu-ray and DVD for X-Men: Apocalypse doesn't arrive until next month, a deleted scene from the film has arrived online and it's...well, it's interesting. I wouldn't call it a good scene, but it's the kind of weirdness that the final cut desperately needs.

Quite frankly, this extended version of the shopping mall excursion briefly glimpsed in the actual movie is silly and dumb and unnecessary and full of more personality than most of the sequences that made it into the version we saw in theaters. Do we need to see Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, and Jubilee walking through a mall in slow motion while "Safety Dance" blasts on the soundtrack? Nah, but in a movie that otherwise lumbers from set piece to set piece while forgetting that the best parts of any classic X-Men story tend to the be character moments between adventures, it could have been a refreshing change of pace.

Sure, individual elements don't work and it feels like each scene goes on a little too long (and that's surely because this sequence wasn't tightened up before it was released), but there's a potentially promising montage lurking within this footage. Interestingly, this footage also leans heavily on the '80s setting, which is odd when you remember that the rest of the movie treats the period setting as a disposable element that can be ignored whenever it gets inconvenient. This take on this decade may be cheesy and obvious, but once again, at least it's something.

The future of the X-Men movies feels uncertain at the moment. Apocalypse didn't light the box office on fire and Hugh Jackman has made it very clear that the Wolverine movie he's filming right now will be his last time playing the character. Meanwhile, that Gambit movie keeps on drunkenly careening into every possible roadblock. At this point, the future of this world seems to lie in the hands of Deadpool, of all characters. Who saw that coming?

X-Men: Apocalypse hits Blu-ray and DVD on October 4, 2016.