20th Century Fox has not only rescheduled the next ‘X-Men’ movie, but they have changed the title. The picture will no longer be known as ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’, but rather simply ‘Dark Phoenix’. Just a week ago, the studio released a new trailer and poster for the film. In both, the film is still referred to by its longer name, and the release date February 14, 2019, were on display. But just days later, Fox announced that the film would be bumped back to June 7 and now comes word that ‘X-Men’ has been dropped from the title.
The name change may have come at the insistence of director Simon Kinberg who said:
“I wanted to call it Dark Phoenix in again very much the way we wanted to call Logan ‘Logan’ as opposed to ‘X-Men: Logan’ to indicate that it’s a different kind of film and to indicate that it’s a more character-driven movie. And for me, and Hutch [Parker], as people who worked on X-Men III: The Last Stand, that didn’t have any trace of Dark Phoenix in the title, we really wanted to indicate that this is the Dark Phoenix story and that she’s at the center of this story, she’s the A-plot of this story, everything around this story revolves really centrally around Jean/Dark Phoenix as really the subject of the movie, not the object of the movie.”
Kinberg began as a writer on ‘The Last Stand’ and has been a producer of all movies in the line since ‘X-Men: First Class’, as well as the ‘Legion’ TV series. However, ‘Dark Phoenix’ marks his directing debut and he has previously stated that he wanted this movie to have a different aesthetic than prior X-Movies.
Speaking to Empire magazine, he said “But I wanted it to feel more naturalistic, I wanted it to feel edgier, more handmade, more real. I was very inspired by what James Mangold did with Logan, and I felt like if I could bring a measure of that aesthetic in the film that all of the intergalactic and larger-scale things that happen in the movie would feel more shocking, more realistic, more emotional. They’d be grounded in some reality.”
He also stated that the aesthetic of the film, including the uniforms and a newly-designed X-Jet will look more “naturalistic” and compared the overall effect to the original ‘Star Wars’ films.
The newly renamed ‘Dark Phoenix’ stars Jessica Chastain, Michael Fassbender, Summer Fontana, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Evan Peters, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Sophie Turner and opens on June 7, 2019.
Source: ComicBook.com
