Last week’s Dark Phoenix trailer reveal certainly prompted more questions than answers about the X-Men‘s fate. Most of all, fans are curious if the film will do justice to Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s iconic 1980 comic storyline after its previous translation in X-Men: The Last Stand received a lukewarm reception back in 2006. In a sit-down with Collider, wirter and director Simon Kinberg and producer Hutch Parker opened up about where the older film went wrong and how the upcoming installment plans to set things right.
Kinberg, who also penned The Last Stand, acknowledged that the film’s biggest mistake was forcing the Dark Phoenix Saga to take a backseat to the “Gifted” storyline derived from Joss Whedon and John Cassady’s run on Astonishing X-Men. He also appeared to walk back comments made while promoting X-Men: Days of Future Past when he described his screenwriting efforts on that film as redemption for his work on The Last Stand.
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“I mean, I felt bad bashing The Last Stand because mainstream audiences, if not fan audiences, liked it. There’s a lot of things that worked in it. But what I regret about it is that it’s not the Dark Phoenix story. I regret that it’s the cure plot story with Dark Phoenix as a subplot and it should have been the Dark Phoenix story as the main plot of the film…I think the world perhaps wasn’t ready for a dark enough tone at that point in the cycle of superhero movies.”
He added that Dark Phoenix is “a more dramatic, intense, emotional story, and that is something that we’re really trying to do with this film.”
Among other topics, Kinberg touched on the film’s final run time, which he insists won’t go over two hours and twenty minutes, as well as his view that the banter and conflict between the characters are what set the comics and films apart from similar properties. He also teased today’s panel at New York Comic-Con, which, despite what the new trailer implies, “will give a much better indication of what the impetus is for how [Jean] transforms into the Dark Phoenix, and there is a cosmic entity and a cosmic force that is much more responsible for what happens to Jean than anything Charles did psychologically to her.”
Do you think Dark Phoenix will improve upon The Last Stand‘s adaptation? Let us know in the comment section below!
