In 2019, we’ve already witnessed the the end of an era in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the polarizing end to HBO’s Game of Thrones. But wait, that’s not all! The X-Men franchise and current Star Wars saga are also coming for our hearts this calendar year.
The mutants are up next with the release of Dark Phoenix, and the film’s writer/director Simon Kinberg is prepping fans to say goodbye. Check out his recent words:
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.
Did all our favorite franchises coordinate to leave our lives all at once? Because I feel like we need a breather here. These are a lot of farewells at once. Dark Phoenix will hit theaters less than three weeks after the Game of Thrones finale and a little over a month away from Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of the MCU thus far. Now that we’ve grown accustomed to bittersweet endings, will this X-Men conclusion measure up?
When Simon Kinberg sat down with Comicbook.com, he also teased the movie as being the most intense of the X-Men films. When Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey gets hit by a solar flare during a mission in space with the rest of the team, she develops new incredible powers that threaten the X-Men and the world.
One trailer for the film particular heightened the stakes when it showed that Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique would be killed off by Jean in the first act. While the decision to reveal this in the trailer surprised many, Kinberg has said Mystique’s death won’t be the only major casualty in Dark Phoenix.
The movie also marks the last of Fox’s main X-Men movies, since Disney recently obtained the rights to the franchise. So while the mutants will likely be seen again someday in the MCU, Kinberg took this chance to close out the stories told through the franchise since 2000’s X-Men. He has noted that it has always been the plan to end the series with Dark Phoenix; this isn’t only a side effect of the Disney/Fox merger.
Ride off into another fictional sunset with the X-Men with Dark Phoenix coming to theaters on June 7.
