The X-Men are having a moment. At D23 2026 in Anaheim, Marvel Studios finally revealed key cast members for the team’s long-awaited MCU introduction, confirming Kit Connor as Cyclops and Adam Driver as Mister Sinister ahead of the film’s May 5, 2028 release. The announcement naturally sent fans back to the Fox era to look over everything the new movie has to live up to — with one scene in particular zipping past the competition.
Quicksilver’s Pentagon kitchen run in X-Men: Days of Future Past, set to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” remains one of the most beloved scenes from the franchise’s Fox era. According to producer-writer Simon Kinberg, much of what people remember most about the scene wasn’t even in the script. Kinberg discussed the sequence at Collider‘s “Producers on Producing” panel at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, where he appeared alongside Platinum Dunes producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form. Each producer brought a clip to break down, and Kinberg chose the Pentagon kitchen sequence. As he put it, the scene existed in his screenplay as a single beat.
“The guards fire. Quicksilver slows time enough to move the bullets out of the way, and then time snaps back.”
Everything people actually remember about the scene — the flying pots, the song itself — arrived later through a chain of collaborators most audiences never think about. The details Kinberg laid out are worth dwelling on, because they quietly reassign credit for one of the most imitated superhero sequences of the 2010s. The previs team reportedly invented the idea of Evans’ Peter running in a circle around the guards, and they were also the ones who dropped “Time in a Bottle” onto their animated pass.
Kinberg also said that director Bryan Singer responded to that previs and added the wall run. Second unit director Brian Smrz, a veteran stunt coordinator whose credits run from Face/Off to the later X-Men films, contributed the idea that Quicksilver would start toying with the guards mid-run. Kinberg ultimately admitted he should get less credit for the scene:
“I brought it up only because I think so many people look at it as like, “Oh, the writer wrote it, the director directed it,” and the truth is, I wrote almost nothing, Bryan directed a day of it, and then there were a whole team of people, that if you really enable them, as a producer, to be creative, not just to execute, but to also ideate, they can end up helping you create something as memorable as that.”
The Quicksilver scene landed hard enough that X-Men: Apocalypse effectively revisited the formula on a bigger scale, with Marvel’s own speedster showcase in Avengers: Age of Ultron inviting inevitable comparisons the same year. Whether Jake Schreier’s MCU X-Men tries anything in that register is anyone’s guess, but it seems safe to assume that at this point, no one would be foolhardy enough to try and copy the original.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
