X-Men Producer Teases Alternate Dark Phoenix Plans With Famke Janssen

X-Men: Dark Phoenix finally made a blockbuster movie adaptation of the classic Marvel Comic storyline, but needless to say, fans weren’t necessarily thrilled with the film. What’s worse is that this was the second time that Fox struck-out with trying to bring the Dark Phoenix to the big screen: the first failure was Brett Ratner’s attempt to shoehorn a Dark Phoenix storyline into X-Men: The Last Stand. Well, longtime X-Men movie producer (and Dark Phoenix director) Simon Kinberg recently did a watch-along party for X-Men: Days of Future Past, where he dropped some interesting tidbits about a very different Dark Phoenix movie, starring original Jean Grey actress Famke Janssen.

Speaking during IGN‘s X-Men: Days of Future Past watch party, Simon Kinberg broke down the ending of the film, where Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) wakes up in a rebooted version of the original X-Men Trilogy timeline – one in which the events of The Last Stand have effectively been erased. That meant X-Men fans got to see some very special character cameos for the first time in years, including Janssen’s Jean Grey, James Marsden’s Cyclops, and Kelsey Grammar back as Beast. It’s during this scene that Kinberg drops some details about how the original X-Men cast would’ve handled a proper Dark Phoenix story arc (2:44:00 in the video):

“It’s possible that… in the alternate universe… because it would’ve been about ten, fifteen years since The Last Stand, you could do Dark Phoenix with Famke. And you could do it with the Hellfire Club, and you could do it I think with the screen time it necessitates because it’s such a complex storyline. You’d probably want a two-part movie: you’d want to bring the Hellfire Club in; you’d want it to be truly intergalactic; you’d want to bring in Lilandra; you’d want to really tell it that way. And I think you’d need at least one bridge movie this [Days of Future Past] and the beginning of that [Dark Phoenix]. But the maturity of those actors and the history that goes back would’ve been 25 years – at this point (2014 when DoFP was released) 20 years since X1 – could’ve been really interesting.”

Indeed, X-Men fans have wanted (and deserved) a proper, full-scale telling of the Dark Phoenix saga ever since X2 first teased Jean Grey’s (Janssen) Phoenix awakening. However, Fox never fully committed to that epic story and instead did two half-hearted remixes that both fell short.

…Maybe Marvel Studios can get it right with the X-Men’s upcoming reboot?