X-Men: ‘Dark Phoenix’ Director Explains Why the Film Was Delayed

Upcoming X-Men movie Dark Phoenix has been delayed multiple times. This had led to some speculation that the movie may not be coming together as well as the studio would like, but the film’s director says that’s not the case.

Speaking to CinePOP at Comic Con Experience in Brazil, Kinberg says its all about getting those special effects into shape.

“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.”

Previous delays had been blamed on everything from poor test screenings to Sophie Turner’s filming schedule for Game of Thrones. Either way, fans will just have to hang in there until the film is released.

When Dark Phoenix is released, Kinberg believes it will be the start of a new era for the X-Men movies.

“I see it as a new chapter,” Kinberg says. “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. 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.

“But that was 20 years ago and I think, I really felt like it time to really change the look, the feel, the tone, the vibe of these movies. And that doesn’t mean this is the one going forward, it just means that if it’s me or whoever directs the next one, you can make it different, and you have to make it different.”

Dark Phoenix opens on June 7, 2019

Upcoming X-Men movies include Once Upon a Deadpool on December 12th, The New Mutants on August 2, 2019, and Gambit on March 13, 2020.