It’s hard to believe the reboot cast of the X-Men franchise is at its fourth film with this summer’s 20th Century Fox release, Dark Phoenix. Despite delays caused by studio mergers, this last film before who-knows-what will happen couldn’t look better, an exciting topper on the X-Men movie franchise. With eleven of thirteen films released so far since the first film, X-Men, arrived with Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and Ian McKellen in 2000, it’s become the seventh highest grossing film franchise ever. With a pretty stuffed superhero film market only getting bigger this year (the last of the Fox Marvel films, The New Mutants, follows in August), Dark Phoenix could be the film that dodges the hype, bringing a classic film story and legion of familiar characters into what will hopefully be a solid comic book story adaptation. Since X-Men: First Class, James McAvoy‘s Professor X, Michael Fassbender‘s Magneto, Jennifer Lawrence‘s Raven, Nicholas Hoult‘s Beast, and (with X-Men: Days of Future Past) Evan Peters‘ Quicksilver are among the best actor/character combinations of all the superhero films.
One of the best parts of X-Men: Apocalypse was the re-introduction of Jean Grey, with Sophie Turner providing an engaging take of the character, along with what might be the best incarnation in any medium of the normally bland Scott Summers, improved upon by actor Tye Sheridan. Argue it how you want, Marvel Comics has long established the most powerful superhero to be Jean Grey as Phoenix. And yet among the weakest of the eleven films was X-Men: The Last Stand, the first attempt at revealing her power. With Dark Phoenix, fans get to see another attempt. Were the X-Men movies to be transferred a few years earlier into the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Disney, would we be seeing some version of Jean Grey in the position of Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel, poised to eliminate Thanos in Avengers: Endgame? Or Deadpool, also, for that matter, who has similarly been nestled in the Fox version of Marvel and written to destroy Thanos before)?
Whatever the climax of Avengers: Endgame, it’s good to know another superhero movie awaits this summer. Check out the new poster and this stellar new trailer for Dark Phoenix:
by Craig Shirley and read all of the vitriol directed against Japanese people in the days after Pearl Harbor in the summations of newspaper accounts. I know that not using derogative terms to talk about groups of people is a relatively new concept, but looking at the headlines and words used in newspapers still gave me pause. (The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the chapter I just read mentioned Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Redskins.)
