Director Simon Kinberg approached DARK PHOENIX as a celebratory culmination of the iconic X-MEN saga.

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight during the premiere of The Twilight Zone, DARK PHOENIX director, writer and producer Simon Kinberg opened up about the drastic stakes in the film and explained where the X-Men stand now that Disney has acquired 20th Century Fox’s stable of Marvel characters.

“Not everybody’s going to die, I can promise you that,” he said when asked about the reveal of Mystique’s presumed death in the film’s second trailer. “That’s not a spoiler. The trailer does indicate what is true for the movie, which is everyone is at risk in a way that they haven’t been in all the previous X-Men movies and that they are facing their gravest threat yet because it’s someone that they all love.

“It’s one thing when you’re going up against an arch villain, it’s another thing when the arch villain is your girlfriend, your daughter, your best friend or comrad. So really the family of the X-Men starts to kind of implode because Jean/Phoenix starts to lose control and the question is, what point do you give up on someone you love if they start to kill people you love?”

Every fan is on pins and needles wondering what Disney and Marvel Studios plan to do now that they’ve acquired the X-Men. The assumption is they’ll soon reboot with a new cast, but that’s still up in air. According to Kinberg, he doesn’t really know what will happen but says he approached Dark Phoenix as a “culmination” of this long-running film franchise.

“I don’t [know], really to be totally honest. I do know that when we were making this movie it was well before the merger was even in the ether of happening and we approached the movie as a culmination of the X-Men saga, because now it was the fourth movie with the X-Men: First Class cast and the Dark Phoenix story is the sort of ultimate X-Men story if you know the comics and you talk to the fans. So we really approached it like it was, not the end, but sort of a celebration culmination of 20 years of making these movies.”

Dark Phoenix arrives in theaters on June 7, 2019.

Source: Entertainment Tonight