The latest X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix arrives in theatres on June 07, and the team over at 20th Century Fox seem confident in the film they’ve got on their hands. They just dropped the third and final Dark Phoenix trailer, and it does an excellent job setting the film’s stakes. The trailer offers an up-close look at the X-Men, evil Jean, and even outer space.
Dark Phoenix Trailer:
The last film in the series, 2016’s X-Men Apocalypse is considered a commercial and critical failure. Its domestic box office take of $155,442,489 fell short of its estimated $178 million production budget. (It made $388,492,298 at the foreign box office). People went to see the movie, but it left a foul impression. X-Men: Apocalypse holds a 47% rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes and a paltry 65% audience score.
After X-Men: Apocalypse, the X-Men series’ ship began to sink. Normally 20th Century Fox would need this follow-up to be a commercial and critical success to keep their boat afloat. But we’re living in a different world now that Disney purchaased Fox. No matter how Dark Phoenix plays out, odds are that Disney kills the series and reboots it on their own terms — new cast, new continuity, and the potential for MCU crossovers. And there are plenty of other reasons for Marvel to end this X-Men continuity.
These films never got to the heart of what makes the X-Men great. A show like Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy does X-Men better than Bryan Singer ever did. X-Men comic books play out like episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, but with superpowers. They feature messy characters who don’t know who they are as well as friendship, love triangles, and all kinds of high school drama. Saving the world comes second.
Sure, the characters in the pictures look like their comic book counterparts, and the films borrow from classic X-Men storylines like Days of Future Past, but aside from Wolverine and Deadpool, these films have yet to nail the characters. I don’t want to spend time with these versions of Cyclops, Storm, Beast, Mystique, Nightcrawler, and Jean; after watching the series, I don’t get the sense they want to spend time with each other.
The X-Men movies have yet to do right by the X-Men comics, and the Dark Phoenix trailer doesn’t give me any reason to think they’ve turned things around. It’s just another overwrought, action-heavy superhero movie with characters cosplaying as the heroes I’ve grown to love.
Dark Phoenix Synopsis:
This is the story of one of the X-Men’s most beloved characters, Jean Grey, as she evolves into the iconic DARK PHOENIX. During a life-threatening rescue mission in space, Jean is hit by a cosmic force that transforms her into one of the most powerful mutants of all. Wrestling with this increasingly unstable power as well as her own personal demons, Jean spirals out of control, tearing the X-Men family apart and threatening to destroy the very fabric of our planet. The film is the most intense and emotional X-Men movie ever made. It is the culmination of 20 years of X-Men movies, as the family of mutants that we’ve come to know and love must face their most devastating enemy yet — one of their own.
