Simon Kinberg Hopes To Avoid The Mistakes Of ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ With ‘Dark Phoenix’

With Logan and Deadpool setting the bar for X-Men films pretty high, the results from X-Men: Apocalypse left fans and some of the folks behind the scenes wanting more. While the film looked good and featured plenty of mutant action, it garnered poor reviews and reactions from fans. Despite talk of the purchase of Fox by Disney placing the future of the X-Men in exciting places, the studio and producer/director Simon Kinberg are hard at work on Dark Phoenix.

The hope is that the classic storyline will bring the series back in line according to a new first look feature from Entertainment Weekly, correcting the sins of the last film and creating something that is more in line with what they feel has always been the driving force in X-Men films:

“I think we took our eye off what has always been the bedrock of the franchise which is these characters,” admits Apocalypse writer/producer and Phoenix director Simon Kinberg. “It became about global destruction and visual effects over emotion and character…

“One of the things I went into this film wanting to do is obviously focus on the characters and give them real emotions to play and come up with a theme that would make it feel relevant and necessary in today’s world,”

Producer Hutch Parker adds in the EW piece that the superhero genre is “evolving aesthetically and tonally” and Apocalypse missed that mark, saying it “felt dated.” While trying to correct the problems with X-Men: Apocalypse, going stripped down for a story that is cosmic in scope seems a little odd. That said, Sophie Turner claims that Kinberg is working with a balance of the fantastical and realistic:

“It is so gritty and there are so many fantastical things in this movie and we really wanted it to resonate with every member of the audience who watches it so we had to make to so real as well. You still get that sense of escapism when people start flying but there’s so much reality in it. I think it will really affect people. And the way Simon shot it — the majority of this movie is handheld, like Steadicam.”

Kinberg tells EW that part of his pitch to Fox was to have it “all feel organic and it needs to feel like it lives in our world” when it comes to the powers and sights on screen. Hopefully, this means we’re in store for something closer to Logan rather than the type of “grounded” and “realistic” we saw in something like Fantastic Four.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)