X-Men: Dark Phoenix Director Reveals Why He Kept the Hellfire Club Out of the Movie

In the pages of Marvel Comics, The Dark Phoenix Saga is one of the most beloved X-Men stories ever published from the popular franchise. Next week, 20th Century Fox will attempt to tackle that story for the second time on the big screen when Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters. And while this new take attempts to be more accurate than X-Men: The Last Stand, it still is missing some key elements; most notably, the Hellfire Club.

Director Simon Kinberg spoke with DigitalSpy about Dark Phoenix, revealing why the Hellfire Club, Lilandra, and the Shi’ar Empire are absent in this film despite being so pivotal to the original comic book storyline.

“I think if I had four hours to tell this story I would’ve included the Hellfire Club, I might’ve included Lilandra,” Kinberg explained. “Because I wanted it to be so focused on Jean and I wanted to really tell a character story a little differently than we have in the past in the X-Men. In the past it’s been a little more horizontal, meaning there was a breadth of character, there was a bunch of characters. In this one I wanted to go a little more vertical, I wanted to go deep with our main characters, and especially with Jean.“

He added, “So while I loved the Hellfire characters and their role in the Dark Phoenix saga in the comics, and I loved the Lilandra storyline in the comics, all of those felt like they were going to start to compete with the main story of Jean and her emotional crack-up and the break-up of the X-Men family. And I didn’t want to draw away from that main emotional through-line.”

It makes sense that Kinberg decided to shy away from inflating his film with a bunch of new characters, despite the Hellfire Club already being established in X-Men: First Class. Chris Claremont and John Byrne had the benefit of weaving their narrative over the course of many issues, leading to an explosive confrontation.

Though it sounds like there were some major changes to the ending of the film, which suspiciously includes a race of shape-shifting aliens as the villains. And no, they aren’t the Skrulls.

We’ll get to see how it all comes together when Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters on June 7th.