With Dark Phoenix, writer/director Simon Kinberg hopes to correct a wrong he feels was committed with X-Men: The Last Stand. That hated film did a shoddy job of adapting the classic Dark Phoenix Saga, with Kinberg’s co-written script a big part of what sucked about it. That was thirteen years ago, and it led to a soft restart with prequel X-Men: First Class five years later.
We may be seeing things come full circle with Dark Phoenix, as it could very well be the last of the current iteration of X-Men. With the Disney deal with Fox now completed, Marvel’s mutants will probably get rebooted before appearing in the MCU. But according to Kinberg, the plan was always for this to be the final X-Men movie, regardless of what Disney has up their sleeve. He tells Comicbook.com…
“From the beginning of conceiving what we were going to do with this film and writing it, which was three plus years ago, so long before there was a Disney merger, I felt like this was the natural culmination for this cycle of X-Men movies. Because it is seeing this family that you’ve come to love and know for how ever many films, and if you count the originals almost 20 years now, you see that family tested in a whole new way. You see that family start to fall apart in a real way for the first time, ultimately come back together.
“That felt like the culmination of a storyline or a cycle of these films. And for me, and for most of the fans … Dark Phoenix is the ultimate and most iconic storyline in the X-Men universe. And so I didn’t know how we would top Dark Phoenix within this cycle. This felt like we had to earn our way back to Dark Phoenix. And I feel like we did hopefully, and beyond that felt like we’d want to sort of create an ending and the possibility of a new beginning. And that’s what we do on this film.”
Hmmm, I seem to recall Kinberg talking about “expanding the universe” of the X-men which would not be a concern if the franchise were always to wrap up. But whatever, the point to me is that Kinberg seems resolved on the idea that a Marvel reboot is coming.
Dark Phoenix opens June 7th.
