Entertainment

The New 'Dark Phoenix' Trailer Will Get Your Heart Racing

by Ani Bundel
Disney

When Disney announced it was buying up 20th Century Fox, instead of the usual hand wringing over monopoly building, entertainment fans were delighted. 20th Century Fox had two of the cards Disney needed to complete its sets (the Illinois and Pacific Avenues of the deck as it were), with the rights to Star Wars Episode IV in perpetuity, and the rights to the X-Men franchise. However, even though the merger is now finalized, there's still a couple of X-Men movies to go from the old stable. The new Dark Phoenix trailer is a reminder of how long Fox held out in returning these characters to the fold.

Unlike Star Wars: A New Hope, which Disney was never going to get without swallowing the entire company whole, the X-Men were a just-out-of-reach tease for Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe. The contract said if Fox stopped making these films after a certain amount of time had passed, the rights would revert back to Marvel, and therefore Disney. Fox responded by never having the characters out of production, rebooting the entire cast of the regular X-Men films to continue the franchise, while experimenting with genre version of X-Men films, like Deadpool and Logan.

The result is that, even with the company no longer in existence, there are still two X-Men movies to arrive. It's a convenient reality for Disney, who can keep the franchise in the forefront of people's minds while figuring out how to recast and integrate the characters into the existing MCU.

This is the last trailer for Dark Phoenix, and the finality about it reflects the reality that this will be the last movie in the franchise as envisioned by Fox. It's a little sad, since when Turner and company were cast in X-Men: Apocalypse a couple of years ago, they were seen as the franchise's future, and Dark Phoenix was supposed to be the beginning of their journey. However, with every character most likely up for recasting (yes, even Sophie Turner), having a few die off Game of Thrones-style isn't that big a deal, since there are no direct sequels to worry about anymore.

It looks like Turner gets to kill off more than one in this final installment to boot. The second trailer, released last month, heavily suggested she would kill off Mystique, played by Jennifer Lawrence. Now, the footage in the new trailer makes it look like she'll be taking out Michael Fassbender's version of Magneto while she's at it.

This is actually the second go at the Dark Phoenix storyline the X-Men franchise has attempted. The first, X-Men: The Last Stand which was released in 2006, was actually the final film in the trilogy starring the original cast of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, with Famke Janssen as Jean Grey. It seems fitting that the rebooted cast will end on a new version of the same tale, albeit with a few more deaths than the first go round.

Dark Phoenix will fly into theaters June 7, 2019.