X-Men: Dark Phoenix Director Compares The Film To Logan And The Dark Knight

This June, the X-Men franchise will come to an end after 20 years with X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Much of the talk around this fact concerns Disney’s buyout of Fox, which makes the conclusion of the saga seem like a corporate decision. However, director Simon Kinberg has been keen to emphasize that it was his intention all along to use the movie to bring to a close the mainline X-Men series in its current form.

Kinberg told ComicBook.com that he sees Dark Phoenix, a redo of the same classic comic book storyline already attempted in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, as the culmination of every entry in the franchise over the last two decades. In this way, fans could think of it as the X-Men equivalent of Game of Thrones season 8 or Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame. 

“I approach this movie as the culmination of 20 years of storytelling, of living with the X-Men for all this time and watching this family come together, and this movie is the movie that challenged that family and tears them apart in a new way. And so I imagined it as the culmination, and I even pitched it to the studio, as this is the culmination of this cycle of X-Men stories. Which there will be more X-Men movies in the future no doubt, but this particular cycle with this cast, it felt like it was time to do kind of what Game of Thrones has done, what Endgame has done, really see them challenged in a new way and sort of survive and go off into the sunset.”

The filmmaker then went onto explain why he had to direct DP himself, after serving as a writer and producer on many previous entries in the series. Kinberg said that he had a specific vision for the movie to be more “intense” and “raw” that what we’ve seen from the X-Men team films we’ve had before. In fact, we can apparently expect something more in line with Logan and The Dark Knight. 

“My vision for the film was a more intense, a more raw X-Men film than we’d done before. So as I said I was very clear with the studio from the beginning. I said ‘Listen, this is going to push the envelope of the PG-13 X-Men movies that we’ve seen before. It’s gonna be much more like the Dark Knight movies, or like Logan than it is gonna be like the previous X-Men films.’ And I felt like it was time for a change after 20 years of making these movies, and this particular story, I think, requires an intensity to tell properly.”

Kinberg has previously commented that he hasn’t heard how Disney will handle the X-Men now that the rights have returned to Marvel Studios. We do know that they’ve pushed back The New Mutants to next February, something that’ll now act as a strange curio for fans rather than the start of a trilogy it was intended to be. It sounds like the true conclusion of Fox’s X-saga will be Dark Phoenix though, so be sure to catch it when it arrives in theaters on June 7th.