During Deadpool 2’s premiere in New York, producer Simon Kinberg revealed that his directorial debut, X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be much more grounded to the comic version, than the divisive X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). Originally slated to release this November, the movie is now pushed to 14 February 2019.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix marks Kinberg’s directorial debut, after spending more than a decade contributing to this X-Men franchise. He wrote and produced X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse besides producing Deadpool, The Fantastic Four. The upcoming projects in his sleeve are The New Mutants, Gambit and X-Force.
“I’m trying to think of what new I can say that’s new. I directed the movie and it’s much more loyal to the original comic than X-Men 3, which told the Dark Phoenix story. It’s a movie that involves extraterrestrial characters, which is not something that we’ve done in the X-Men franchise before, and is something that is a huge part of the Dark Phoenix saga in the comics,” Kinberg mentioned.
The first two movies of the franchise, X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003) which were directed by Bryan Singer, ended with a teaser that the next movie would follow the Dark Phoenix saga. Though, Singer did not return for the next movie, Brett Ratner took the reins for the final installment of the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), which followed the Dark Phoenix saga.
However, the original trilogy was eradicated by the time-bending events of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), which allowed the studio to tackle this story with a new cast, from a different approach.
Commenting on the rumors about the tone being darker than other X-Men movies Kinberg added, “The tone is… I wouldn’t say it’s darker, but it’s more intense. It’s more real and grounded, and hopefully more relatable, a little less operatic than we’ve been in the past.”
This movie will continue to follow the ‘tradition’ of the setting in the previous three films, which are all set in different decades. X-Men: First Class (2011) is set in the 1960s, tracing the first group of mutants that came together under Charles Xavier’s leadership, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) set in 1970s, in a darker present-day timeline, X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) was set in the 1980s, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be set in the 1990s, although a specific year has not yet been revealed.
