As if the negative buzz for Dark Phoenix wasn't bad enough, Fox decided to follow the film's trailer debut by delaying the movie four months. Yeah, that looks good. Keep going with that. Fan reaction was exactly what you'd expect for a film that has been delayed on a couple of occasions, while facing reports of extensive reshoots and rewrites. The trailer's release should have been a time for director Simon Kinberg to be singing the film's praises, but instead he's just doing a bunch of explaining.
In an interview with Collider, Kingberg says the reshoots weren't anything major, just the typical studio-mandated stuff that comes with every blockbuster investment. He also talks specifically about what needed to be retooled, and his answer matches some of the previous reporting on this subject...
“Mostly we focused on the third act, both emotionally and in terms of the physical scale and the action of the third act that we adjusted. And then there were certain things in the first two acts of the movie—very few things, but to set up those changes in the third act we had to adjust some things in the first two acts so that all was fluid and felt consistent.”
Okay, so what about this latest delay and the unfortunate timing? While the trailer wasn't terrible, in fact I liked it a lot, there weren't a lot of people talking about it. Kinberg says the schedule change has nothing to do with audience reaction to the trailer, and about pumping up the visual effects and maximizing box office potential in China...
"It was a date, February 14th, that we initially liked for the movie but when we realized that we weren’t gonna have the visual effects ready to release it globally the way we wanted to, and the Gambit date opened up because it wasn’t gonna be ready for that June 7th date. We looked at that date versus the February 14th date, the studio did and we did, we felt like that June date was a bigger opportunity for us globally. More screens, more IMAX screens, a better chance to play in China where these movies have a massive following. What we found when we released the trailer was that 44, 45 million views of the trailer were in China alone… Specific for us, it is an opportunity to be a bigger movie day-and-date globally."
The X-Men will return in Dark Phoenix on June 7th 2019. At least that's the date for now but would anybody be surprised if it moves again?
