X-Men: ‘Dark Phoenix’ Director Confirms Magneto’s Genosha

More details about X-Men: Dark Phoenix are coming to light in the wake of the first trailer being released, and one that will probably give Marvel Comics fans a thrill is the confirmation that Dark Phoenix will feature an iconic X-Men locale.

In an interview with Empire Magazine, director Simon Kinberg revealed that one scene in the X-Men: Dark Phoenix trailer does in fact reveal Michael Fassbender’s Magneto building the iconic mutant homeland, Genosha! As Kinberg explains:

“What you’re seeing is the beginnings of Genosha. That’s where Erik is when we meet him. It’s like Magneto’s Israel – a land built for mutants, a homeland where they can be safe and self-sufficient. Jean finds him there because what’s happening to her is making her do destructive things, and she doesn’t know why. The only person she’s known who has done destructive and lethal things in the past but came back from it is Magneto. She feels he alone can give her answers because he’s lived both sides. He’s lost control and killed and hurt people, some of whom he even loved, and yet he’s also found a measure of peace and that’s what she’s searching for.”

In the X-Men comics, Genosha is a small island nation located off the Southeastern coast of Africa. The nation gained distinction for its system of enslaving mutants and stripping them of free will, thereafter using them as “Mutates,” whose powers were used as tools and/or weapons of the state. The X-Men and their sister teams were instrumental about freeing the mutate populace, and in a controversial move, the U.N. eventually ceded the island to Magneto as an independent nation that served as a mutant haven. Magneto ruled Genosha until Xavier’s twin sister, Cassandra Nova, unleashed massive “Wild Sentinels” in an attack that nearly wiped out Genosha’s 16 million mutant citizens.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix catches up with Magneto as he’s seemingly just getting his vision for Genosha off the ground, and it’ll be interesting to see the film’s adaptation of it. What’s going to be especially interesting is seeing if Dark Phoenix connects this new version of Genosha back to the version that appeared in the original X-Men movie trilogy. If you don’t recall, the first X-Men movie had Magneto operating out of a base of operations that was named as Genosha; Magneto returned to that same location in X-Men: The Last Stand. So, Genosha already exists in the original X-Men timeline – but with the changes of the First Class timeline, we could either see a very different version of it, or a nice callback to the original film. Which would you prefer?

X-Men: Dark Phoenix hits theaters on February 14, 2019. The New Mutants will follow on August 2, 2019.