‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’: Why SPOILER’s Death Doesn’t Ruin the Franchise Continuity

In the run-up to X-Men: Dark Phoenix, producers finally ripped the Band-Aid off of a major plot point and revealed in the movie’s full trailer that a major character from the X-Men films will die.

Given that the current X-Men films, which began with X-Men: First Class, take place in the decades prior to Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men franchise launcher.

This has led a bunch of fans on social media to object to the character death, noting that the character existed in X-Men and other films that took place years after Dark Phoenix.

So let’s get into why that is not the case.

Spoilers ahead for X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

The trailer showed the Phoenix Force overwhelming Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), and the Phoenix taking her over and lashing out at the X-Men. The victim who took the brunt of the damage? Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who played a significant role in the original X-Men trilogy, played then by Rebecca Romijn.

The last time we saw that version of the characters? In X-Men: Days of Future Past, a time-travel extravaganza that brought together the casts of both X-Men franchises.

At the end of that film, though, there was an alternate timeline created by all the time-travel shenanigans of the story.

In the reformulated timeline, there were a number of apparent changes, including one that would reverberate through the other movies: Mystique abandoned Erik’s Brotherhood of Mutants and remained with the X-Men.

While a commendable moral decision, this seems to have ended rather disastrously for Mystique, who now dies fighting the Dark Phoenix rather than becoming Magneto’s right hand for years go come.

Yes, the death of Mystique technically means that the original X-Men trilogy will not play out the same way in this timeline — but that was always the case, because Mystique stayed with the X-Men instead of joining the Brotherhood in this timeline. Her death does not really change anything beyond what fans already knew was changed — or at least seriously in flux — following Days of Future Past.

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