Oh dear. It seems that, since X-Men Apocalypse wasn’t the smash hit with critics and audiences that Fox had been hoping for, the studio has more plans to keep hold of its movie rights by any means necessary. This time, by adapting the now-legendary Dark Phoenix storyline for the big screen.
Now, settle down in the back there. Don’t get excited. There’s more.
As any Marvel fan will tell you, the Dark Phoenix saga is pretty damn awesome. It shows us the story of X-Men founding member Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl, being exposed to cosmic radiation and attaining an incredible level of psychic power. Although she and Charles Xavier try to put psychic blocks in place to limit Jean’s new powers, they are unlocked by the machinations of the Hellfire Club and overwhelm her personality. Now calling herself Dark Phoenix, Jean casually causes a supernova in a distant solar system to absorb its energy, wiping out all life there. The Kree, Skrull and Shi’ar empires determine that Dark Phoenix is more of a threat than the planet-eating Galactus and unite to kill her, despite Xavier managing to put more psychic blocks in Jean’s mind. In a climactic battle on the Blue Area of the Moon, Jean sacrifices herself to save her team-mates and end the twin threats of Dark Phoenix and an alien invasion focused solely on killing her.
Sounds awesome, huh? Well, it is. Remember, this was done between 1977 and 1980, and at this point the only time a comic book character was killed off and sort of resurrected was Gwen Stacy in the truly bizarre original Clone Saga in Spider-Man. People died and stayed dead, so killing off a major character was a colossal shock. But it seems that Fox aren’t planning to do something as truly awesome as this, no siree Bob.
Bryan Singer won’t be returning to helm the next X-Men movie after Apocalypse’s poor showing and writer Simon Kinberg will instead be making his directorial debut with X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Be worried already, as Kinbeg previously screwed the pooch on the Phoenix mythos when he wrote Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand.
“[We must] find a way to ground it so it’s not too intergalactic,” Kinberg said recently, before adding that the X-Men movies will remain “human” and “emotional” during his tenure.
Look. This is a franchise that features a woman who can control the weather and a man who shoots lasers out of his eyes because solar power. And we are supposed to just accept this because they have a slight genetic mutation, essentially making them transitional forms between Homo Sapiens and the next step in our evolution. Even though there is no way imaginable that a transitional form would include laser eyes (what the hell is he adapting to, a brick wall?) and that directly controlling the Earth’s climate is scientifically impossible. Yet alien invasions are somehow too much? Odin’s raven, over at Marvel Studios they just cranked out the second movie featuring a gang of intergalactic pirates that includes a talking raccoon and a walking tree on its team! You thought Fant4stic was bad? Ye gods, HOW is this storyline going to be grounded without ruining it?
If anybody wants me, I’ll be down Forbidden Planet, looking through the graphic novel section and swearing at 20th Century Fox under my breath.
Source: Comic Book Movie
Dave Bowling
Dave was born at an early age to parents of both sexes. He has been a self-confessed geek for as long as he can remember, having been raised through the 80s on a steady diet of Doctor Who, Star Trek, Red Dwarf and (sigh) Knight Rider. Throw the usual assortment of Saturday morning cartoons into the mix and we have something quite exceptional: someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of utter tosh; a love of giant robots and spaceships fighting; and the strange desire to leap tall buildings in a single bound while wearing his underpants over his trousers. The death ray is currently in the works and one day you shall all bow to him, his giant space station and fleet of funky orange space shuttles...
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