I’ll be honest; I think Dark Phoenix is going to turn out to be a disaster. The movie itself might end up being okay, but as it’s the last X-Men movie before the Fox franchise goes bye-bye and Disney reinvents it…well, there’s not much incentive for people to buy a ticket. There’s absolutely zero enthusiasm for it, which may be why this latest trailer leans hard on the previous 20 years of quality X-Men films.
For those who don’t know, today is X-Men Day! It’s okay if you didn’t know; the holiday was totally made up by Fox to drum up attention for Dark Phoenix‘s release. Sorry, no days off from work. Anyway, it’s a time to look back and celebrate the X-Men’s adventures on the big screen, starting with that first movie in 2000, the still-amazing X2: X-Men United, and more. The feeling they’re going for is that all of that was inevitably leading up to Dark Phoenix, which is weird when you see the same storyline play out, albeit terribly, in X-Men: The Last Stand.
For me, this is a reminder of how great things used to be. The X-Men took comic book movies to another level and were the standard bearer for 8 years before Marvel Studios came along and stole their lunch money. I still hold many of these films in extremely high regard, including X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. Even when Disney reboots things I will still be a fan.
I just don’t know if this did Dark Phoenix any favors. Probably not. We’ll find out when the film opens on June 7th.
