20th Century Fox is taking some extra time to polish what could be the final X-Men movie in its current series, but they’re still offering fans a look at the upcoming mutant mayhem of Dark Phoenix.
A brand new photo for X-Men: Dark Phoenix shows Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) uniting heroes Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Check it out below:
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James McAvoy, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp and Kodi Smit-McPhee star in #DarkPhoenix. pic.twitter.com/yy6sAHAX27
โ X-Men Movies (@XMenMovies) December 14, 2018
Despite Disney’s looming purchase of 20th Century Fox and the likely reboot of the X-Men franchise under Marvel Studios, writer and director Simon Kinberg is saying that the upcoming film will serve as a new beginning for the series.
“I see it as a new chapter,” Kinberg said to CinePop during CCXP in Brazil last week. “I see it as taking the franchise in a different direction tonally. And that doesn’t mean that the next one will have the same tone, it just means that the next one can have a different tone. I think for many years, the X-Men, Bryan [Singer] really transformed the superhero genre in 2000 or 2001 when the first one came out. That’s almost 20 years ago. It is a long time ago. And at that time, superhero movies were not wildly popular, actually. There had been a few failures in the mid-90s, and there hadn’t been a lot of superhero movies, if any, around that time and X-Men sort of was revolutionary in its moment.
“But that was 20 years ago and I think, I really felt like it time to really change the look, the feel, the tone, the vibe of these movies. And that doesn’t mean this is the one going forward, it just means that if it’s me or whoever directs the next one, you can make it different, and you have to make it different.”
“It is a drama at its core and it’s really about a young woman who’s losing control, and becomes dangerous to herself and to others, and what that does to the family that loves her and to the friends that love her, and how it splits them up,” Kinberg explained. When you add to that the fantastical element that losing control means that she could destroy the entire planet, it becomes an X-Men movie but without all that stuff. And this is the way we talk as collaborators, me and the actors and the actresses. We didn’t really talk about the fantastical stuff. We talked about the drama, and I have the greatest actors in the world playing it.”
Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters on June 7, 2019.