X-Men: Dark Phoenix Director Teases Details About Film's Original Ending

When X-Men: Dark Phoenix was announced, it originally earned a November 2018 release date, only for that opening to be delayed to earlier this month. Films have their release dates delayed for a number of reasons, yet with no official confirmation on the reason for Dark Phoenix's delay, audiences were left to wonder why we would have to wait even longer to see the final entry in the X-Men franchise. Now that the film has finally landed in theaters, and with audiences aware that the film underwent reshoots, fans have hoped to learn how the narrative originally unfolded. Writer/director Simon Kinberg recently detailed that his original ending was not only unfulfilling to test audiences, but also to him and his fellow members of the crew.

"The reason I wanted to go back to reshoot things, though, was because this was meant to be the culmination of this family that's grown together over however many movies, but it's also a movie that tears that family apart," Kinberg revealed to io9. "They're facing a more serious trauma than they've ever seen before. The end of the movie really would have been more about the division between Charles and Scott with the rest of the X-Men. But one by one, the other X-Men side with Charles, and by the end, it's just Scott by himself."

He added, "But in watching it myself and watching it with audiences during test screenings, the feeling was: if you're going to put this family through all of these things, you're going to want to see them united at the end. We never finished shooting that ending, but no matter how far along I got with it, it always felt like it was lacking closure and unity. That was really the impetus for the changes."

Some reports speculated that one reason for the reshoots was that the original ending of the film felt too similar to Captain Marvel, which hit theaters earlier this year. Kinberg confirmed that there were some similarities, yet he was unaware of the details of the Marvel Studios film when developing Dark Phoenix and conducting those reshoots.

"The truth is, I think a lot of the cast saw Captain Marvel, and then went off to do interviews, and sort of put two and two together," Kinberg confessed. "But the decision to reshoot what we reshot happened before Captain Marvel came out, and you know, I don't have access to Marvel Studios' planning process. Having said that, our original ending that I'd storyboarded did have things in common with the very end of Captain Marvel."

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is in theaters now.

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