X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX Creative Team Want Us to Believe The Film Was Planned as The End Before Disney Bought Fox
When Disney was going to take over Fox we all knew that meant the X-Men franchise that Fox has been producing over the years was going to end. Well, according to X-Men: Dark Phoenix producer Hutch Parker, that’s not the reason why Dark Phoenix is going to be the last X-Men film in the Fox franchise.
According to Parker, Dark Phoenix was always meant to be the film to close out the franchise. While talking to CB at WonderCon, he explained that the development of the project led them to a “natural culmination.”
“You know, we did, not for the reasons that would seem to be the case now, but in the sense that we felt like we were completing certain emotional arguments. We were completing certain emotional ideas. And in trying to take the story further, it dictated we make certain choices from which we couldn't come back. You know, Raven's death, certain choices that, I guess for me, one of the challenges of doing the sequel to a franchise is how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep pushing forward? And I think too often we treat the ground is we play it safe and we don't make movies that are as interesting as they should be.”
Parker then added:
“So we tried to free ourselves from that hesitation this time and kind of let it fly. And so in its own way, that became a kind of natural culmination.”
While I’m sure this all led to the movie feeling like a natural conclusion, the Disney and Fox merger just sealed the deal. There’s no doubt that Fox would have made more X-Men movies if Disney didn’t buy Fox.
Writer and director Simon Kinberg agreed with Hutch, though, saying:
"From the beginning of conceiving what we were going to do with this film and writing it, which was three plus years ago, so long before there was a Disney merger, I felt like this was the natural culmination for this cycle of X-Men movies because it is seeing this family that you've come to love and know for how ever many films, and if you count the originals almost 20 years now, you see that family tested in a whole new way. You see that family start to fall apart in a real way for the first time, ultimately come back together.”
"That felt like the culmination of a storyline or a cycle of these films. And for me, and for most of the fans ... Dark Phoenix is the ultimate and most iconic storyline in the X-Men universe. And so I didn't know how we would top Dark Phoenix within this cycle. This felt like we had to earn our way back to Dark Phoenix. And I feel like we did hopefully, and beyond that felt like we'd want to sort of create an ending and the possibility of a new beginning. And that's what we do on this film."
When previously talking about the film, Kinberg said that he saw this movie as “a new chapter. I see it as taking the franchise in a different direction tonally. And that doesn’t mean that the next one will have the same tone, it just means that the next one can have a different tone."
So it seemed like last year, they seemed to have plans for another film. I think that maybe all of the reshoots that were done for the film helped close out the series more definitively when they found out that Marvel would be getting the rights back.
Regardless, we do have one more X-Men film from Fox to go, and it actually might be pretty good! I saw about ten minutes of footage that was screened at WonderCon, and the stuff I saw was actually really cool. You can read about it here if you want.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix premieres in theaters on June 7th.