Dark Phoenix Director Simon Kinberg Aiming For Avengers: Endgame and Dark Knight Vibes

It sounds like the filmmakers behind X-Men: Dark Phoenix are taking a page out of Avengers: Endgame's book. Where Avengers: Endgame served as the finale for 22 films spanning more than 10 years worth of a franchise, Dark Phoenix is looking to conclude everything the X-Men movies have put together across nearly 20 years of movies according to writer and director Simon Kinberg.

"I approach 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 challenged that family and tears them apart in a new way," Kinberg said. "And so I imagined it as the culmination, and I even pitched it to the studio, as this is the culmination of this cycle of X-Men stories. Which there will be more X-Men movies in the future no doubt, but this particular cycle with this cast, it felt like it was time to do kind of what Game of Thrones has done, what Endgame has done, really see them challenged in a new way and sort of survive and go off into the sunset."

As Disney has now taken complete control of Fox and its Marvel entities, Dark Phoenix may in fact be the final film of the current X-Men saga before Marvel Studios hits the rest button. Such conversations, however, have not yet been held according to Kinberg.

"I don't know that Marvel or Disney knows the answer yet either," Kinberg said. "I think everybody's still figuring it out. I approached this movie even long before the Disney of it all. Three years ago I started writing this script."

In the grand finale, Kinberg makes his directorial debut, something he took pride in and wanted to offer up a different take on characters fans have been familiar with. "When it came time, and I said 'Listen, I really wanna direct this movie,' and I had the real support of the cast to direct the movie," Kinberg explains. "My vision for the film was a more intense, a more raw X-Men film than we'd done before. So as I said I was very clear with the studio from the beginning. I said 'Listen, this is going to push the envelope of the PG-13 X-Men movies that we've seen before. It's gonna be much more like the Dark Knight movies, or like Logan than it is gonna be like the previous X-Men films.' And I felt like it was time for a change after 20 years of making these movies, and this particular story, I think, requires an intensity to tell properly."

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X-Men: Dark Phoenix opens in theaters on June 7.