X-Men: Dark Phoenix Producer and Director on Pushing Violence, Language Barriers

The infamous R-rating has become a common topic in conversations regarding comic book movies. Several films, especially the Logan, Deadpool, and Deadpool 2 trio from Fox, have proved that the extra room for obscene creative freedoms allow movies to succeed despite possibly chasing away a younger audience. The next Marvel film from Fox arrives in the form of Dark Phoenix, which packs in some visceral violence and a small dose of foul language. However, the filmmakers did not consider following the lead of the few R-rated comic book movies before it of achieving such an MPAA rating.

The idea of going R-rated for Dark Phoenix was “not really,” a consideration according to producer Hutch Parker. “I don’t think it wouldn’t have been something we were shy about, we try to, not unlike with Logan, try to let the story dictate the rein. So, to really decide what story we’re telling, how do we best tell it? And then what rating would that require? And in this case it really is more about the emotion than it was about the violence, or about, you know, sex, or about any of the things that would’ve likely pushed it to R. It felt comfortable. I mean it’s still a fairly dark story, but it felt pretty comfortable in this rating.”

Dark Phoenix does manage to maintain a PG-13 setting while offering up unique looks at the X-Men characters in action. Specifically, Magneto and Nightcrawler are unleashed in gritty ways which fans might not be accustomed to.

“I’m glad you picked up on that, because one of the things we wanted to do in that final sequence was to really unleash all the characters, and take the governors off of each of the X-Men,” Parker said. “Both in getting to see them fight together, which is something that was, you know we really hadn’t done a lot of, and leaning into that was great fun.”

In what might be the final X-Men film of the near 20-year franchise, the characters are finally unleashed. “Then, giving each one of them, you know, their kind of berserker moments where you get to see them really become, you know, ragers,” Parker explained. “And getting to see Storm unleashed is incredibly gratifying to me, or Nightcrawler to start to transition into some of the quality you recognize from X-Men 2, the viciousness, the intensity. One of my favorites is Michael [Fassbander]. We designed the action sequence around Michael as if he were a martial artist, so instead of it being just simply manipulating metal and tossing things around, which obviously we’ve seen him do, that last sequence, it’s mimicking what it might be as a martial art fight, and that was great fun.”

Simon Kinberg, who has been attached to X-Men movies since 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, makes his directorial debut for Dark Phoenix. Adding on to Parker’s sentiments, the director was excited to show the X-Men in a more visceral light for what he calls the “culmination” of 20 years of storytelling.

“I’ve worked in these movies for a long time, and we’ve been successful with the X-Men movies, and really the X-men movies have become sort of my family in the last 10, 15 years,” Kingberg explained. “I’ve spent more time on X-Men sets than I have at home. The studio has come to trust me in making these films. And 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. 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.