With Dark Phoenix edging towards its release date on June 7th, buzz has been tempered by the multiple behind-the-scenes problems and tepid reactions to the latest installment in the X-Men franchise. To make matters worse, the film comes at the end of the series as it’s existed at 20th Century Fox since the early 2000s. The similarly-troubled New Mutants will be the thirteenth and final film in the Fox-owned take on the Marvel comics.
Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg recently sat down with ComicBook.com and gave his opinion on what the likely transfer of Marvel’s mutant characters into the broader Marvel Cinematic Universe could look like. He was fairly frank about what the next steps are for a series as well, as he’s been closely involved in as far back as 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand.
“The easy answer is, no, I don’t know the answer. And I don’t know that Marvel or Disney knows the answer yet either. I think everybody is still figuring it out.”
In addition, Kinberg stresses that Dark Phoenix was always planned to be a conclusion to the franchise:
“I approached this movie as the culmination of 20 years of storytelling, of living with the X-Men for all this time, and watching this family come together. And this movie is the movie that challenges that family, and tears them apart in a new way, and so I imagined it as the culmination.”
Drawing comparisons with the ending of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame, Kinberg wants Dark Phoenix to provide a definitive end-point for the X-Men. He also worked on Dark Phoenix with the assumption that the content would be harder than previous films in the franchise, saying:
“This is going to push the envelope of the PG-13 X-Men movies that we’ve seen before. It’s going to be much more like the Dark Knight movies, or like Logan than it is going to be like the previous X-Men films.”
This approach is certainly seen in the intense first clip from Dark Phoenix that was recently released. However, there’s still every chance that the film won’t be the swan-song Kinberg wants, but another step down for the series after the missteps of X-Men: Apocalypse.
Whatever the outcome, we’ll be sharing the first reactions to Dark Phoenix as they come in, as well as the latest news on how Charles Xavier’s mutants fit into the established MCU.