‘Dark Phoenix’ Director Addresses Missteps in Previous X-Men Movies

When Dark Phoenix premieres later this year, it won’t just be the end of an era in the long-running X-Men franchise. It will also be the second attempt at adapting the beloved Marvel Comics storyline for the big screen, and director Simon Kinberg understands it didn’t work out so well the last time.

While speaking at WonderCon about the latest X-Men film, Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker addressed the misstep of X-Men: The Last Stand, the previous attempt to tell a story based on “The Dark Phoenix Saga.”

“You let us know when we got it wrong,” Kinberg said.

“The underlying material is just so good and frankly it’s better than we’ve been as storytellers in some cases,” added Parker, recognizing their failure. “This is a film that aspires to try to tackle the potential of all of that while honoring the legacy and the characters.”

Dark Phoenix will serve as the latest, and possibly final, attempt to do justice to the fan-favorite storyline before the franchise is inevitably rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kinberg previously spoke about how his film is the end of an era and the beginning of something new.

“I see it as a new chapter,” Kinberg said at CCXP in December. “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.”

Added Kinberg, “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.”

We’ll find out what’s next for the X-Men after Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters on June 7th.

[h/t Deadline]

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