The Real Reason X-Men: Dark Phoenix Ending Was Reshot Revealed

X-Men: Dark Phoenix‘s release date was plagued with delays as a result of extensive reshoots which drastically re-shaped the film. As it turns out, the last of the Fox-Marvel movies was originally going to have an ending that was drastically different by comparison to the one which fans will see when it hits theaters, but this change came as a result of another superhero beating them to the punch.

In a recent interview with Yahoo!, Professor X actor James McAvoy and Magneto actor Michael Fassbender opened up about the changes made to the upcoming film. “The end [of Dark Phoenix] changed a hell of a lot,” McAvoy said. “The finale had to change. There was a lot of overlap and parallels with another superhero movie that came out… a while ago.”

The likely candidate for this similarity would be Captain Marvel. Early rumors for Dark Phoenix pointed at the film including Skrulls, which would have made it the first live-action Marvel film to include the shapeshifting characters. While the movie does include beings with such an ability, they are never labeled as Skrulls, while Disney’s Captain Marvel went all in on the alien race.

“They had spies on set,” Fassbender joked, “and [they] basically stole our ideas!”

As it turns out, the parallels in storytelling likely came from using the same pages of Marvel Comics’ books as the narrative’s inspiration. “We were basically trawling through the source material it seems,” finishes McAvoy.

The original ending would have included more of a political theme as well, which is contradictory to that of Captain Marvel. While more details of this ending will surface once Dark Phoenix releases, the original idea involved the X-Men characters not only fighting an alien race, but working to protect humans against politicians who had turned on them.

While speaking to ComicBook.com, writer and director Simon Kinberg explained how comics influenced his Dark Phoenix movie. “Honestly, the main influence, obviously, is Chris Claremont’s original Dark Phoenix saga,” Kinberg said. “Some of the cartoons I looked at, too, because I grew up watching the cartoons as I was also growing up reading the comics. But, like you say, I sort of brought together a lot of different influences, the different tellings of the Dark Phoenix saga with Chris’s original vision. I talked to Chris quite a bit in the process of making this movie, and conceiving this movie. For me, and when I talk to Chris about it, it really is about Jean getting infused with this cosmic force. It was really important to me that we get into the cosmic in this movie. It’s something that the X-Men do in many different comics.”

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X-Men: Dark Phoenix hits theaters on June 7th.