Originally, this was supposed to be the year that we first got three X-Men movies. The idea was that things would kick off with Josh Boone's The New Mutants in April; then it was going to be David Leitch's Deadpool 2 in June; and then finally Simon Kinberg's X-Men: Dark Phoenix in November. These plans were shaken up quite a bit a few weeks ago when New Mutants was moved to next year, and Deadpool 2 bumped up... but now another major change has happened. It's been officially revealed that Dark Phoenix will now no longer be coming out this year, now set for February 2019, and The New Mutants has been pushed to August 2019.
20th Century Fox has made some notable shakeups to its release schedule, according to Deadline, and the most surprising shifts are definitely the moves with the X-Men titles. There are no official reasons given why the changes were made, but they definitely have the effect of changing the superhero movie landscape for the next two years. Sure, there are certainly plenty of different Marvel movies still set to come out between now and the end of 2018, including The Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Ant-Man & The Wasp, Venom, and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, but the limited number of mutant adventures feels strange.
The X-Men: Dark Phoenix news is definitely the bigger of these two announcements, as it really wasn't expected following the big release date changes Fox made in January. While the film had some competition in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and a new feature from Tyler Perry, it still should have been able to make some big bucks at the box office in early November (similar to what Thor: Ragnarok was able to do in 2017). That said, there is now a whole lot of proof saying that superhero movies can do incredibly well in mid-February, especially on Valentine's Day weekend, and it's probable that the studio is chasing those kind of results. And who knows? Maybe it actually can pull off something similar to what Deadpool and Black Panther accomplished in that quarter of the year.
As for The New Mutants, the news is a bit more depressing. We were originally supposed to see the film next month, specifically on April 13th, but fans everywhere were bummed when that changed to February 22, 2019... and now we have to wait until August 2, 2019. Of course, this shift only happened because of the X-Men: Dark Phoenix move (Fox was never going to release them on back-to-back weekends), and has nothing to do with the film itself, but it's still disappointing that the wait has now gotten so much longer. Hopefully the feature will use the extra time wisely and the upcoming reshoots will really help the blockbuster shine when it does finally get released next year.
How do you feel about these release date changes for X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants? Do you think that they will wind up helping the films at the end of the day, or are feelings of impatience overriding excitement at this point? Hit the comments section below with your thoughts, and stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for all of the latest news about the X-Men franchise.
