8 Ways Upcoming Movies Can Fix Franchise Mistakes

3. X-Men: Dark Phoenix Will Do Dark Phoenix Right

X-Men Apocalypse Jean Grey
20th Century Fox

The Mistake: Not doing the Dark Phoenix storyline justice.

How The Movie Will Fix It: X-Men: The Last Stand is not a good movie. It tried to do too much, and as a result, it felt muddled, half-hearted and lacklustre.

One of the biggest things to suffer was the whole Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix subplot, which saw the heroine unleash a powerful alternate personality. It's a dark, dark story, but as Simon Kinberg (the film's writer) pointed out, "the darkness of her story was a little bit daunting on a huge $200 million studio movie."

Overall, The Dark Phoenix plot felt watered down, and was not given the attention it deserved.

Luckily for Kinberg (and us) he's getting a second bite of the apple with next year's X-Men: Dark Phoenix, a movie that is set to feature the Dark Phoenix storyline as its driving force, and not as some under-developed sideshow.

That should be obvious from the title, and in the same interview we linked to above, Kinberg also mentioned how his one regret with The Last Stand was that The Dark Phoenix saga "wasn't the primary story of the movie."

In essence, Kinberg's forthcoming Dark Phoenix movie will be an attempt to do something right that The Last Stand did horribly wrong, and since Kinberg worked on both projects, there's a good chance he'll learn from past mistakes and get it right this time.

In this post: 
Deadpool 2
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.