The Stakes Are High in New X-Men: Dark Phoenix Clip

Disney and 20th Century Fox have released a new clip from Dark Phoenix. The clip shows the X-Men returning from their mission to space and being celebrated by Professor X and the students at the Xavier Institute. That mission, in which Jean Grey should have died but miraculously survived, sets the event of Dark Phoenix‘s larger story into motion. For her part, Mystique is not enjoying playing at being a superhero. Watch the clip above.

In Dark Phoenix, “The X-Men face their most formidable and powerful foe when one of their own, Jean Grey, starts to spiral out of control. During a rescue mission in outer space, Jean is nearly killed when she’s hit by a mysterious cosmic force. Once she returns home, this force not only makes her infinitely more powerful, but far more unstable. The X-Men must now band together to save her soul and battle aliens that want to use Grey’s new abilities to rule the galaxy.”

Dark Phoenix is written and directed by Simon Kinberg and stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, and Jessica Chastain.

In a previous interview, Turner acknowledged the pressure to get this version of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” right. “Yes a lot of pressure,” she said. “I knew Simon [Kinberg, writer and director] was taking me out to lunch and he sits me down and tells me it’s Dark Phoenix and I’m like ‘f*****k.” I know it’s one of the most loved stories of the X-Men universe and for Simon to trust me enough with this responsibility is a big honor. And I want to do the fans of the original story justice, and of course, there’s a lot of pressure especially having been done before. Simon would tell you that it was a B-plot of the movie and he felt it had to be the main plot of the movie.”

In another interview, Kinberg brushed off concerns over Dark Phoenix being rescheduled following reshoots.

“Movies get pushed all the time,” Kinberg says. “I remember JJ [Abrams] pushed Star Trek a year, then he pushed Star Wars a year, and those movies turned out great, and our movie’s turned out great as well. We really wanted to wait until the visual effects…the biggest challenge of this movie in terms of time is visual effects. There’s a lot of visual effects in this movie. They’re really intricate, more intricate than we’ve ever had in these films, partly because it goes into outer space and that’s hard to render. And the movie will be done in actually just a couple of months and you look at the calendar and you start to see competitively where the best place for it to be released would be, the best time, and the studio felt like it warranted a big summer blockbuster release because it became, despite its intimacy, a very big-scale film. So we started looking at summer and that was the perfect date for it in the summer.”

Are you excited about Dark Phoenix? Let us know in the comments. Dark Phoenix opens in theaters on June 7th.