10 Movies That Changed Other Movies

Much has been written about the troubled production of Dark Phoenix, the final mainline entry into Fox's X-Men franchise.

Namely, the entire third act was retooled during post-production, and while it was initially said to be the result of poor test screenings, star James McAvoy revealed that the primary motivation was in fact quite different. In an interview with Yahoo, McAvoy said:

"The finale had to change. There was a lot of overlap and parallels with another superhero movie that came out... a while ago."

Though McAvoy didn't identify the film himself, numerous sources online pointed to Captain Marvel, given that concept art for Dark Phoenix's original finale depicted an epic space battle between Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and the Skrulls, which isn't a million miles away from Captain Marvel's climax.

But in an interview with Gizmodo, writer-director Simon Kinberg stated that he was actually inspired by Captain America: Civil War's third act, and the Dark Phoenix similarities were a mere coincidence:

"My original ending didn't have the entire X-Family together the way they are in the film now. More than Captain Marvel, you could see a lot of Civil War in that ending... I loved the way that Civil War had its big action action set piece where everyone's facing off more towards the end of the second act rather than in the third, so that after that huge battle, you're left with Winter Soldier, Captain America, and Iron Man.

It's this telescoped down view of their raw emotions, and I loved how intimate that was. That's what I was going for with Dark Phoenix's ending even though it then might have looked like Captain Marvel for about two minutes."

Cumulatively, the similarities resulted in Dark Phoenix's finale being reconceived as a set-piece staged primarily on a train. It didn't do much to help the film, though, which was a critical and commercial dud regardless.