Just a couple of months ago I scoffed at Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg's assertion the film was always meant to be the franchise's end, Disney deal or not. It didn't make sense then and still doesn't, but he may not have been completely blowing smoke. His producing partner Hutch Parker tells YahooUK that, whether Marvel Studios acquired Fox or not, the X-Men were due for an evolution.
“I think had the Disney deal not gone through, it’s likely whatever came next was going to be radically different. And that was part of our intention and design. And it really did grow organically out of the last handful of movies and feeling like it was time, and keeping with kind of the great work you’re seeing be done elsewhere. Then we’d not be too precious, and we’d be a little bit more bold.”
Clearly, he's referring to what's being done over at Marvel Studios, who have now lapped the X-Men in terms of quality and definitely in box office. But for the first ten years of Fox's twenty-year run of X-Men movies, they set a high bar for all comic book movies to reach. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the X-Men when Marvel inevitably reboots them.
Dark Phoenix hits theaters this weekend and I kinda dug it.
