Inception made Matthew Vaughn change his plans for X-Men: First Class

The collective unconscious can be a real pisser to writers — one moment you come up with a brilliant and original idea, and the next you discover someone has already beaten you to it.

So imagine the dismay of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS director Matthew Vaughn, who just finally caught INCEPTION and realized it snatched some cool concepts right out of his noggin. He loved the movie, “But my heart sank when I saw that a few of the ideas we had were up [on the screen]. So it’s either leave it in and look as if you’re copying or change things. We completely ripped out about 12 pages of the script and the storyboards,” he tells the LA Times.

The sequence in question was reportedly a “fight involving Professor X (James McAvoy) and some other mutants was to going to be presented with spinning rooms and other physics-bending imagery.”

That adds further pressure to a project already under the gun to start production — Fox has already planted a flag on a June 3, 2011 release date, and the latest mutant movie is still trying to round out its cast.

Besides Professor McAvoy, the movie already has Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto, Alice Eve as Emma Frost, Nicholas Hoult as Beast, Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique, Caleb Landry Jones as Banshee, Edi Gathegi as Darwin and Lucas Till as Havok, with Kevin Bacon as the villain.