X-Men: Dark Phoenix has suffered a couple of delays which have pushed the film back by 7 whole months. It was supposed to come out last November, but then due to massive reshoots, it got pushed to February initially, and then June. Apparently, the first trailer that we got back in 2018 was from the film that was before the reshoots. The rest of the marketing material that followed was after the reshoots. But why are the reshoots of this film so crucial?
Apparently, the entire third act of the film was changed. Sets had been burnt down already, and then the team had to go produce the film again up to a certain extent. The final battle was supposed to take place in space earlier, but now as we’ve seen in the trailers, the fight actually takes place on a train. We probably would have loved the space sequence much more as that would have been quite Unique, but it is what it is!
X-Men: Dark Phoenix seems to have burned a lot of money on the production of the film, and marketing would have obviously taken more. So it will actually be a big deal if this film ends up breaking even. But it is really important for us to know why exactly were there these setbacks in the first place? It’s important because looking at our beloved X-Men franchise end like this with no one caring about it is just heartbreaking.
Apparently, the answer to this lies with the supposed similarities that were between Captain Marvel and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. In a recent interview with Yahoo!, James McAvoy (Professor X) and Michael Fassbender (Magneto) revealed why those changes had to be made. They said:
“McAvoy – The end [of Dark Phoenix] changed a hell of a lot. The finale had to change. There was a lot of overlap and parallels with another superhero movie that came out… a while ago.
Fassbender (Jokingly) – They had spies on set and [they] basically stole our ideas!
McAvoy – We were basically trawling through the source material it seems.”
Now there have only been 2 Marvel films before the release of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, and those are Captain Marvel & Avengers: Endgame. It was being reported earlier that the Skrulls are a part of X-Men: Dark Phoenix. They wouldn’t have been called that, but they certainly would have had similar shapeshifting abilities. So, if X-Men: Dark Phoenix would have come out either in November or February, then Fox’s X-Men Universe would have been the first one to introduce the race of these Aliens.
But sitting out here having known about the massive reshoots that took place, we can imagine that Disney could have played a role in the change of the story of the film. They were just about to own Fox, and the two studios were maintaining good relations, so seeing similar plots could have caused for Fox to make a few changes here and there if Disney/Marvel had asked for it.
This long franchise is now going to meet its end. Kinberg went on to talk about X-Men: Dark Phoenix being the conclusion to the franchise. He said:
“Even long before the Disney of it all, three years ago, I started writing the script [for Dark Phoenix]. I approached this movie as the culmination of 20 years of storytelling, of living with the X-Men for all this time, and watching this family come together. And this movie is the movie that challenges that family, and tears them apart in a new way, and so I imagined it as the culmination. And I even pitched it to the studio as this is the culmination of this cycle of X-Men stories, which there will be more X-Men movies in the future, no doubt, but this particular cycle with this cast, it felt like it was time to do kind of what Game of Thrones has done, what Endgame has done, really see them challenged in a new way, and survive and go off into the sunset.”
X-Men: Dark Phoenix opens on June 7.
