If Kevin Feige were soliciting advice on how to do justice to the X-Men when the mutants finally make their full-fledged Marvel Cinematic Universe debut, the person who ran the franchise into the ground in the most disastrous fashion imaginable probably won’t be his first port of call.
After being a key cog in the creative machine as either a writer or producer on The Last Stand, First Class, Days of Future Past, Deadpool, Apocalypse, and Logan, Simon Kinberg was tasked to make his directorial debut on the $200 million Dark Phoenix, which proved to be the last mainline outing for Xavier’s group of gifted students before 20th Century Fox was acquired by Disney.
In his hands, extensive reshoots and rewrites yielded not just rampant tales of behind the scenes woe and a catastrophic bomb that lost $133 million by the time the dust had settled, but the single worst-reviewed of the 13 X-Men features to date. With that in mind, maybe his advice on the MCU’s incoming reboot should be taken with a pinch of salt given that Dark Phoenix was woefully lacking in both the story and character departments.
“If I had one piece of advice, honestly, it is a very cliché thing, but it just is true: The strength of the X-Men is the characters. As much as there’s great storytelling and great plot and incredible action sequences and all of those things are going to be required of the movies, as they are in the comics, what sets, for me, the X-Men apart is that they are the richest collection of characters in any comic book ever.”
Kinberg obviously knows the property like the back of his hand having spent more than a decade embedded in it, but when he was handed the reins to steer the ship, he diverted straight into the rocks and watched it go up in flames.
