Although The New Mutants is still set to be the last X-Men franchise movie released that was given the green light when 20th Century Fox was still its own studio, Dark Phoenix will be the last installment of the main X-Men film series. Now that the X-Men and the Fantastic Four are at Marvel Studios, it’s expected that somewhere down the line, these properties will be rebooted to fit within the Marvel Cinematic Universe continuity.
Hutch Parker, who’s been a producer on the X-Men franchise ever since 2013’s The Wolverine, is excited to see these mutant heroes and villains operate in the MCU because it allows new filmmakers tot put their own stamp on their characters. As Parker told CinemaBlend’s own Sean O’Connell during the press junket for Dark Phoenix:
[Marvel Studios is] incredibly gifted and they’ve done great work. And to see their interpretation of these characters, part of the fun of doing the X-Men movies has been seeing different filmmakers’ takes on these characters, and that’s the opportunity we going to see with Marvel, is to see their take on what they would do with these characters, and I can’t wait to see.
No doubt a lot of superhero movie fans share that sentiment, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has made it clear that the X-Men will eventually be utilized within the MCU, though that won’t happen for a long time. Nevertheless, Hutch Parker acknowledged that Marvel has delivered a lot of great content over the years, and he’s eager for new creative minds to step in and adapt the X-Men in ways that are different from what we’ve seen in the Fox era.
As far as the main X-Men film series is concerned, half of it has been directed by the same man: Bryan Singer, who kicked off the franchise in 2000 and ended his run with X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016. Brett Ratner directed X-Men: The Last Stand, Matthew Vaughn directed X-Men: First Class (he was going to stick around for X-Men: Days of Future Past, but he left to work on Kingsman: The Secret Service) and Simon Kinberg, who’s been attached to the franchise since The Last Stand, is making his directorial debut with Dark Phoenix.
However, movies like Deadpool and Logan showed that you can deliver X-Men-related movies that feel neither like the main X-Men entries or ‘regular’ superhero movies. With this genre’s popularity showing no signs of dying down, it’s become more important for these kind of movies to try to stand out, particularly when it comes to tone, and the X-Men franchise was getting a good handle on that.
There were a number of X-Men spinoffs in development before Fox was purchased by Disney, such as Gambit, X-Force and X-23, but aside from Ryan Reynolds being kept around as Deadpool, it looks like Marvel will be starting from scratch on the X-Men mythos. So Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants mark the end of an era, but considering everything that MCU has churned out over the last 11 years, it will be interesting to see what kind of spin this franchise eventually puts on the mutants.
You can listen to Hutch Parker’s full remarks on the X-Men’s cinematic future at Marvel in the video below.
As for Dark Phoenix, it picks up nearly a decade after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse and sees Jean Grey being corrupted and turned into the movie’s namesake. It remains to be seen if audiences will be more impressed with this adaptation of The Dark Phoenix Saga than they were with the first one, X-Men: The Last Stand, but commercially speaking, it’s looking to come in second place at the box office this weekend, trailing behind The Secret Life of Pets 2.
Dark Phoenix opens in theaters this Friday, June 7, and stay tuned to CinemaBlend for any updates on what’s in store for the X-Men within the MCU. For now, you can look through our 2019 release schedule to learn what other movies are coming out later this year.
