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.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!