Now that the ink has essentially dried on Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, a whole new era is underway for both companies.
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ComicBook.com was on hand for Disney’s CinemaCon panel, where new footage was screened from this summer’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. While the footage isn’t expected to be released online, we have an exclusive description of what was shown, which you can check out below.
“Dark Phoenix will arrive as “the final chapter” of the X-Men franchise. It’s a “dramatic finale worthy of its predecessors Logan and Days of Future Past.”
A clip from Dark Phoenix plays. In it, Charles Xavier tells the people of NASA that help is on the way. A team heads up to space. Nightcrawler and Jean ise tjeor powers to retrieve the astronauts but Jean gets left behind and takes on the Phoenix Force. Xavier’s school gossips about it. She should be dead. Jean is tempted. They realize she is changing. She starts to lose control but says, “it feels good.” Charles realizes Jean will kill them all. A fight ensues in what looks like a prison. Magneto brings a whole subway train through the mansion’s door. Jean shuts him down with her powers. Fire flies and she is all powerful.
“It’s the perfect sendoff for our X-Men team.”
Dark Phoenix is an interesting sort of entry in Disney’s upcoming slate, as the film was wholly created (and initially given two earlier release dates) under Fox. The project is believed to be the last entry in Fox’s version of the X-Men world, before the characters are largely recast for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While that might put an interesting cloud over Dark Phoenix, the film’s cast and crew have hinted that it has no effect on how the film will wrap things up.
“From the beginning of conceiving what we were going to do with this film and writing it, which was three plus years ago, so long before there was a Disney merger, I felt like this was the natural culmination for this cycle of X-Men movies,” director Simon Kinberg explained to ComicBook.com during a recent interview at WonderCon. “Because it is seeing this family that you’ve come to love and know for how ever many films, and if you count the originals almost 20 years now, you see that family tested in a whole new way. You see that family start to fall apart in a real way for the first time, ultimately come back together.
“That felt like the culmination of a storyline or a cycle of these films. And for me, and for most of the fans … Dark Phoenix is the ultimate and most iconic storyline in the X-Men universe.” Kinberg continued. “And so I didn’t know how we would top Dark Phoenix within this cycle. This felt like we had to earn our way back to Dark Phoenix. And I feel like we did hopefully, and beyond that felt like we’d want to sort of create an ending and the possibility of a new beginning. And that’s what we do on this film.”
What do you think of the details of the latest Dark Phoenix footage? Does it impact how you feel about the upcoming film? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be released in theaters on June 7th.
