What Does The Ending Of X-Men: Apocalypse Really Mean?

The Dark Phoenix Is Coming

In the final fight, to defeat Apocalypse Jean Grey summons upon a great power within her, walking on air and burning with bright fire, one of the movie's biggest direct allusions to the future of the franchise; as Bryan Singer hinted a month or so ago, we're getting The Dark Phoenix Saga. Where the main series of straight X-Men films is going in a broader sense is unclear, but this is one thing you can bank on happening.

What we learn about it in Apocalypse is that, as in the original movie timeline, the Phoenix Force is already inside Jean, an immense power that threatens to break out and will, eventually, need to be contained. This naturally makes a lot more sense than the space version of the comics and allows for more gradual foreshadowing, so I can see why they've gone with this again.

We of course already got an approximation of The Dark Phoenix Saga in The Last Stand, but it was an incredibly bastardised version that was ultimately side-lined in favour of a more generic cure storyline. A big part of Days Of Future Past's reset was to provide the opportunity to do it right; Singer set it up neatly in X-2, but the pay-off was bungled, so here's he's laid the groundwork again.