The Disney-Fox deal is done and the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool are all heading back home to Marvel Studios where they belong. X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be the last Fox produced comic book movie (excluding New Mutants whose exact situation is unknown) before all the characters not named Deadpool gets rebooted and reintroduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why the film hasn’t been receiving much pre-release fanfare. The general thought: Why should anyone care about the final movie in what has been a hit or miss franchise, especially when all the characters are going to be rebooted anyway?
Dark Phoenix isn’t going to be breaking any box office records when it drops in theatres in a couple of weeks time, that’s for sure. But it looks like fans might be in for a treat if they do decide to give the film a fighting chance. In an interview with ComicBook.com, first-time director Simon Kinberg, who has been producing X-Men films for over two decades, shares his passion for the project.
“When it came time, and I said ‘Listen, I really wanna direct this movie,’ and I had the real support of the cast to direct the movie. My vision for the film was a more intense, a more raw X-Men film than we’d done before. So as I said I was very clear with the studio from the beginning. I said ‘Listen, this is going to push the envelope of the PG-13 X-Men movies that we’ve seen before.
It’s gonna be much more like the Dark Knight movies, or like Logan than it is gonna be like the previous X-Men films.’ And I felt like it was time for a change after 20 years of making these movies, and this particular story, I think, requires an intensity to tell properly.”
I don’t know if the movie is going to end up being great, but Kinberg’s quote definitely piques my interest. An intense and emotionally heavy film is the perfect way to for this 22-year-old franchise to bid adieu. It’s confident of Kinberg to compare his film with modern day classics like The Dark Knight and Logan, and while that sure as heck sounds exciting, I think it’s best if we manage our expectations. After all, this franchise has dropped the ball more than a couple of times in the past.
After the incredible X2: X-Men United, we were all pumped to see a brilliant Dark Phoenix story, only to get the cheesy near-disaster The Last Stand from Brett Ratner. A similar thing happened recently. After Bryan Singer’s stellar X-Men: Days of Future Past, all of us went into Apocalypse with sky-high expectations only to receive a middling and messy picture. Having said that, if the trailers are any indication, X-Men: Dark Phoenix does show promise, especially when it comes to Sophie Turner’s performance.
In the same interview, Kinberg went on to say that Dark Phoenix will very much be a proper culmination of a franchise that kick-started in the year 2000.
“I approach this movie as the culmination of 20 years of storytelling, of living with the X-Men for all this time and watching this family come together, and this movie is the movie that challenged that family and tears them apart in a new way. And so I imagined it as the culmination, and I even pitched it to the studio, as this is the culmination of this cycle of X-Men stories. Which there will be more X-Men movies in the future no doubt, but this particular cycle with this cast, it felt like it was time to do kind of what Game of Thrones has done, what Endgame has done, really see them challenged in a new way and sort of survive and go off into the sunset.”
X-Men: Dark Phoenix hits Malaysian theatres on June 6.
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