After some delays and reshoots, 20th Century Fox has unveiled the first trailer for Dark Phoenix. This is presumably the last film in this iteration of the franchise that began with X-Men: First Class back in 2011 and it seems oddly fitting that they’re finishing on exactly the same story that the last version. It really has come full circle with the team from the original films now in place (as introduced in Apocalypse) and with the 10 year time jumps of each film, the team is now in the 1990s and almost ready to meet an amnesiac Wolverine.
Not that continuity has any meaning for these films. Days of Future Past apparently reset the timeline and gave the whole team a happy ending where they all lived and The Last Stand never happened, but that rather killed any dramatic impetus there might be for the future of the prequels. But here we are, with Jean Grey ready to become the Dark Phoenix and tear apart both herself and the world.
The previous take on this story, X-Men: The Last Stand was widely derided as wasting one of the X-Men’s best stories and it appears as though this time, they’re making some similar mistakes. As these films have featured (James McAvoy) as the leading man and it seems this is making the story as much about him as it is about Sophie Turner’s take on Jean Grey.
Disney are in the process of acquiring Fox and it seems it’s only a matter of time before this franchise is folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With all they have going on, the best thing they could do would be to put the X-Men in the fridge for a decade or so.
Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp and Kodi Smit-McPhee also star in a film directed by longtime producer Simon Kinberg.
Dark Phoenix arrives in theatres in theatres on 5th February 2019.
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