X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX will put emphasis on its strong female cast and characters.

X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX will place greater focus on the female characters than ever before, says writer/director Simon Kinberg to Entertainment Weekly. “I really wanted to acknowledge the strength of the women in the comic and in the actresses that we have and the central storyline demands it.” There’s even a scene where Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique jokes to Charles Xavier about renaming the team “X-Women” based off how many times the female members save the male one.

The film will place Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey front and center, unlike 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, which reduced the character’s iconic storyline to a subplot involving a mutant cure and had her play second fiddle to Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants in the third act.

“It’s really exciting,” says Turner. “I think there’s such a revolution in superhero movies. I feel like this movie is a revelation because of it being like a drama but the hero is a female and she’s also the villain. It really is about her relationships with the females in the film, especially Jessica Chastain’s character. It’s really interesting to have those two characters be kind of the two biggest characters in the movie and both be female and so layered and so complex.”

Chastain previously said she joined the film based off how the female characters were respected in the film’s script. “I’ve always wanted to do a big comic book franchise-y film but I had some issues with the female characters in the films I was being offered. I was really pleased with this script because I think it’s a departure from the norm. This definitely passes the Bechdel test and I don’t know how many comic book films can say that.”

Dark Phoenix flies into theaters on November 2, 2018.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

Jessica Chastain talking about her character in "X-men: Dark Phoenix" pic.twitter.com/GZD5ODxF3m

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