Yesterday’s first trailer for X-Men: Dark Phoenix gave us a lot to chew on. One of the most intriguing details that it teased was a major death occurring in the film. In a brief clip, the X-Men can be seen gathered around a freshly-dug grave for a funeral and the implication is clear: Jean Grey going off the deep-end is going to have fatal consequences for one of the mutant heroes.
So, who can we confirm is safe? Well, we can definitely make out Professor X, Beast, Cyclops and Storm at the graveside, so we know none of them are the subject of the funeral. If you remember, a report from earlier in the year claimed that one of the four characters left over from 2011’s X-Men: First Class would kick the bucket in Dark Phoenix. If that’s true, that means we can narrow the search down to either Magneto or Mystique.
From a real-world point of view, either of those would make sense, as Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender are both in-demand actors who might be getting itchy feet about staying with the X-Men franchise any longer. If you ask us, though, Mystique’s the most likely candidate here. Her character arc basically came to an end in Apocalypse when she made the switch to the good side and became the field leader of the X-Men.
Whoever it is, the idea that the unstable Jean ends up killing one of her friends, something that just unhinges her even more, is lifted directly from X-Men: The Last Stand, which is the last time the Dark Phoenix Saga was adapted for the big screen. On that occasion, it was Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier who met his maker. Not that that death stuck, though, as his consciousness was revealed to have survived in a post-credits scene, with subsequent installments deciding to just bring him back to life completely.
Again, our money’s on Mystique being killed in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but I guess we’ll find out for certain on February 14th, when the pic flies into theaters and brings the saga to a close.
