Director Claims Dark Phoenix Always Conceived as Ending for X-Men Movies

April 1, 2019

After Dark Phoenix soars into theaters this summer, one of the longest cycles of superhero movies will end. Now that the X-Men are in Marvel Studios’ hands, the franchise will seemingly undergo a reboot. After explaining that rhis decision was made before Disney’s acquisition of Fox, director Simon Kinberg told ComicBook that his intentions were always to conclude Fox’s cycle of X-Men movie with the Dark Phoenix storyline.

“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,” Kinberg said. “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.“

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Furthermore, Kinberg said that by ending the cycle with the Dark Phoenix storyline he also created “the possibility of a new beginning”.

“That felt like the culmination of a storyline or a cycle of these films,” Kinberg added. “And for me, and for most of the fans … Dark Phoenix is the ultimate and most iconic storyline in the X-Men universe. 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.“

Dark Phoenix hits theaters on June 7. Do you think the upcoming movie will be the natural conclusion of the X-Men movies cycle? Let us know in the comment section below.