BEWARE SPOILERS!!!
If you saw this morning’s trailer for Dark Phoenix, you may have witnessed a major spoiler. While the troubled X-Men film doesn’t come out for a few more months, we already know a key character in the franchise, one that has been a huge part of it for years, won’t be surviving through to the end.
The film is another chance for writer/director Simon Kinberg to get the classic Dark Phoenix Saga right, as Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) loses control of her powers and the cosmic Phoenix Force possessing her. Unleashing untold destruction, Jean also lashes out at her friends in the X-Men, dealing a fatal blow to Mystique, who has been played by Jennifer Lawrence ever since 2010’s X-Men: First Class.
In an interview with EW, Kinberg talks about the decision to kill off Mystique and at the same time remove one of the franchise’s biggest stars…
“Well, the thought process behind that was to primarily show that this is a movie that is unlike other ‘X-Men’ movies. It’s a movie where shocking things happen, where intense, dramatic things happen. People don’t just fall off buildings and dust themselves off and walk away. There’s a reality to this movie and a consequence to this movie. Even more than that, it was to show that Jean/Dark Phoenix is genuinely a threat to everyone, including the X-Men.”
He continues…
“I had a lot of emotions about it. I was obviously sad about it, as Jen’s friend, and also as a fan of Jen as an actress. But I felt it was the strongest, most dramatic thing for the movie, and sometimes you have to make those kinds of hard decisions to service the larger story. And the larger story really is Jean cracking up, losing control because she’s more powerful than anyone else in the world. To dramatize that properly, you have to show real loss, you have to show real pain and show real threat and menace. I didn’t want to do that by her blowing up a building with anonymous people in it. It had to feel really personal for the X-Men, and I wanted it to be something that would fracture the X-Men as well. Mystique is someone who in our universe has been part of the X-Men and has been part of Magneto’s world. Her death impacts literally everybody.”
Kinberg’s not wrong there, and he promises there will be “other major casualties in this.” I think we have a pretty good idea who else could be on the chopping block. It was reported back around X-Men: Apocalypse that Lawrence, along with stars James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, were looking for a way out but decided to stick together. It looks as if Lawrence has her exit strategy.
But will this be the final exit for all of the X-Men? With the Disney deal looming, a reboot of the franchise is possible, if not likely, and Kinberg stresses that he has no idea what the future holds. What he does promise is that when Dark Phoenix opens this June it will be a fitting end, if that’s what it turns out to be…
“It felt like it was time at least to give them some huge explosive story that demanded a different kind of resilience from them. I really felt on this one I couldn’t imagine where else to go with these characters after what they’ve gone through in this movie.”
