As we all know, X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be the last mainline mutant-based movie to come from Fox before Disney hoovers them up and Marvel Studios gets the rights back to Professor X and his super-powered peers. At this stage, we’re not sure to what extent the film will wrap up the franchise that we’ve been watching for the past 20 years, but at the very least, the recent trailer tells us that the movie won’t resist throwing some shade at Marvel.
In the trailer above, the assembled mutants are captured by some sort of anti-mutant military unit, only being freed when the super-powered Jean Grey besieges the train they’re being transported on. If you tear your attention away from the awesome spectacle and action for a moment though, take a look at the insignia on the sleeves of the soldiers and you’ll notice that they’re labelled “MCU.” You can’t tell us that that’s just a coincidence…
Presumably, the initialism stands for something like “Mutant Control Unit,” suggesting this is some governmental agency dedicated to policing mutants. Interestingly, Deadpool 2 featured a similar body called DMC, so it seems like writer/director Simon Kinberg deliberately decided to revamp the organization in order to make a tongue-in-cheek dig at the rival franchise. After all, these military goons are rounding up and kidnapping the X-Men, which is one way of looking at what Marvel’s doing with the rights to the characters.
At this point, it hasn’t been 100% confirmed that the X-Men will be folded into the MCU, but all the evidence suggests that they will. We know for sure that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige will shepherd the franchise from now on and the Russo brothers feel confident that he’ll want one cohesive Marvel movie universe. On the flip side, Dark Phoenix stars James McAvoy and Sophie Turner don’t seem to think mixing the X-Men and the Avengers would work, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix blasts into theaters on June 7th, 2019.
