With Deadpool & Wolverine clawing away at box office records and X-MEN ‘97 gaining huge streaming numbers, Awfully Good Movies is heading back in time with the TVA to discuss 20th Century Fox’s fourth and final X-Men prequel before their MCU merger… DARK PHOENIX! (Or as it was retitled on home video… X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX!)
That title change was just one of many problems that Fox had before and after filming the last of its mutant saga, with Bryan Singer getting #MeToo-ed out of the director’s chair and longtime franchise writer/producer Simon Kinberg taking his place to have another go at adapting Chris Claremont’s “Dark Phoenix” Saga, after his disappointment at poorly adapting it for Brett Ratner’s infamously disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand. But with its release delayed to fix the ending’s similarities to Captain Marvel, only to end up releasing one month after Avengers: Endgame was still snapping up box office profits, it was obvious that their future at Disney spelled doom for their final days at Fox.
As for the returning X-Men cast, many of the older actors from First Class visibly don’t want to be there (looking at you, Jennifer Lawrence!), while the younger actors who still need to prove themselves after Apocalypse get pathetically little to do, especially Sophie Turner as a Jean Grey whose evil transformation into the Phoenix mostly consists of her sulking for the camera a lot. And don’t get me started on Jessica Chastain as our big alien villain who plans to cleanse the blah blah blah, you’ve heard all this before, and she’s wasted even worse here than Christian Bale in Love and Thunder.
And with Hugh Jackman having retired (for now) from Wolverine after Logan already gave us a satisfying ending to the X-Men saga, his absence makes this finale to the once-great X-Men prequels a depressingly generic slog that’ll have you wishing Mickey Mouse would snap these younger X-Men out of existence already. Oh, and there’s a new X-Man who has sentient dreadlocks… in the words of Stan Lee, ‘nuff said!
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