'Dark Phoenix' Producer Says Disney Purchase Isn't the Reason the Series is Ending

WonderCon is in full swing in Anaheim, and some of the folks behind the upcoming X-Men film, Dark Phoenix, were in attendance to promote one of the last iterations of 20th Century Fox's longstanding franchise. Hutch Parker, one of the film's producers, spoke to Comicbook.com at the event and shared that the recent merger between Disney and Fox, which was completed earlier this month, is not the reason the series is ending.

"You know, we did, not for the reasons that would seem to be the case now, but in the sense that we felt like we were completing certain emotional arguments. We were completing certain emotional ideas. And in trying to take the story further, it dictated we make certain choices from which we couldn't come back. You know, Raven's death, certain choices that, I guess for me, one of the challenges of doing the sequel to a franchise is how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep pushing forward? And I think too often we treat the ground is we play it safe and we don't make movies that are as interesting as they should be."

Added Hutch, "So we tried to free ourselves from that hesitation this time and kind of let it fly. And so in its own way, that became a kind of natural culmination."

During the interview, Hutch also shared what makes this upcoming film different from X-Men: The Last Stand.

Dark Phoenix will serve as the latest, and possibly final, attempt to do justice to the fan-favorite storyline before the franchise is inevitably rebooted as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The film's director, Simon Kinberg, previously spoke about how the new film is the end of an era and the beginning of something new.

"I see it as a new chapter," Kinberg said at CCXP in December. "I see it as taking the franchise in a different direction tonally. And that doesn't mean that the next one will have the same tone, it just means that the next one can have a different tone."

Added Kinberg, "I think for many years, the X-Men, Bryan [Singer] really transformed the superhero genre in 2000 or 2001 when the first one came out. That's almost 20 years ago. It is a long time ago. And at that time, superhero movies were not wildly popular, actually. There had been a few failures in the mid-90s, and there hadn't been a lot of superhero movies, if any, around that time and X-Men sort of was revolutionary in its moment."

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

Additional reporting by Scott Huver.

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