X-Men: Dark Phoenix - 8 Mistakes It Must Avoid
Or it'll go down in flames.
The Dark Phoenix Saga is one of the most celebrated X-Men storylines of all time, so why was the news that the next movie is going to be based on it met with as much fan trepidation as celebration?
Well, they tried to adapt it for cinema once before, and the results weren't exactly supernova.
Brett Ratner's 2006 misfire The Last Stand, which drew influence from the Jean Grey-centric event, is considered the weakest entry in the mutant series, and its worst crime was watering down the seminal arc... and casting Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut.
Dark Phoenix puts mutant telepath Jean front and centre as she becomes consumed by a twisted cosmic power, a process which kicked off in X-Men: Apocalypse.
Sophie Turner's Jean Grey struggled with her abilities throughout the movie, and all hell was unleashed during the final battle when Jean took out the titular villain by channeling a giant flaming bird.
This was a hint of what she will be capable of in Dark Phoenix, except it won't be just the bad guys on the receiving end of it.
Here's 8 mistakes the movie must avoid;
8. Shifting The Focus From Jean Grey
X-Men: The Last Stand's biggest mistake with the Dark Phoenix saga was attempting to combine the story with another comic arc, and doing justice to neither.
Jean Grey and her inner struggle were relegated to subplots while the film followed Magneto and his army's war against humankind, elements plucked from Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men story Gifted.
The Dark Phoenix saga is epic in scope and cosmic in scale, and therefore doesn't lend itself well to dilution.
This is a major pitfall the movie must avoid by sticking to the core premise of Jean and her inner turmoil as the malevolent Phoenix Force engulfs her mind, body and soul, turning her against her loved ones.
Her plight is the essence of the story, and the one thing that must not be lost during the page-to-screen transition.