If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The X-Men film series is adopting this mantra with Dark Phoenix, as the last attempt to adapt the classic Dark Phoenix Saga storyline, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, was not well-received among fans. The first Dark Phoenix footage was released to the public back in September, but since the movie was delayed shortly thereafter, that gives 20th Century Fox extra time to promote the seventh main X-Men installment, and now you can watch a brand-new trailer for it below.
Set in 1992, nearly a decade after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix sees Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey losing control of her Phoenix abilities after being hit by a solar flare while on a rescue mission with the X-Men in outer space. Her subsequent turn to darkness will drive a wedge in the mutant superhero team and those closely associated with them, as they have differing views on how to stop Jean before she becomes too powerful. Making matters worse, an alien shapeshifter, played by Jessica Chastain, is manipulating Jean for her own purposes.
For more than a year, we’ve been promised that Dark Phoenix would feature a major death, and surprisingly, this latest trailer seems to give it away: Mystique (just as I suspected). As the X-Men come find Jean in a town where she’s caused some damaged, the shapeshifting mutant tries to calm her pupil down and bring her back to the light. But it isn’t enough, and Jean telekinetically propels Mystique back. There’s a slim chance that this is just a classic case of trailer misdirection, but given that Jean says Mystique “was” her friend and we see the funeral later on, it appears that Raven Darkholme’s story in this new X-Men timeline is over.
From there, we hear Jessica Chastain’s character goading Jean Grey into accepting her godlike powers while Professor X and the X-Men still loyal to him, and Magneto and his new group of allies, take different approaches to dealing with Jean’s corruption. Naturally this results in blows and destruction, but at the end of the Dark Phoenix trailer, we see many of the characters imprisoned in a train with their powers dampened and armed soldiers keeping a close eye on them. Does this mean that William Stryker is back in town? However the mutants ended up in this situation, they won’t be there for long, because Jean has arrived to rip the train off its tracks into the air.
While not officially confirmed yet, Dark Phoenix is looking to be the last of the X-Men movies of the Fox era before these characters are brought to Disney and almost certainly incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So Dark Phoenix needs to end this film series with a bang, and in terms of emotional upheaval and general pandemonium, it looks like the movie will not be lacking. Whether or not it does a better job of adapting Dark Phoenix remains to be seen, but at the very least, this looks to be the most devastating cinematic X-Men story yet.
Dark Phoenix opens in theaters on June 7, so stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more updates. In the meantime, look through our 2019 release schedule to find out what else is coming out this year.
