Director Simon Kinberg Explains ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’ Reshoots and Release Date Change

When we finally got our first look at X-Men: Dark Phoenix last week, there was a collective shrug from the fan community. It honestly looks like Apocalypse Part 2, and I don't think I'm alone in saying I don't need any more of that movie.

There never seemed to be much need for a fourth film in the rebooted First Class trilogy, and furthermore, the way Days of Future Past ended, it didn't even really need to be a trilogy. But these movies make money and Fox wants to squeeze a little more blood out of this stone before it gets locked in the Disney Vault with the rest of the Marvel properties and Walt's head.

The directorial reins were passed to producer Simon Kinberg, and he recently spoke with Collider about the film's rough road to the big screen. First up, they talked about those rather extensive reshoots...

“Mostly we focused on the third act, both emotionally and in terms of the physical scale and the action of the third act that we adjusted. And then there were certain things in the first two acts of the movie—very few things, but to set up those changes in the third act we had to adjust some things in the first two acts so that that all was fluid and felt consistent.”

As far as the film getting bumped back again, it was a business decision this time around...

"It was a date, February 14th, that we initially liked for the movie but when we realized that we weren’t gonna have the visual effects ready to release it globally the way we wanted to, and the Gambit date opened up because it wasn’t gonna be ready for that June 7th date. We looked at that date versus the February 14th date, the studio did and we did, we felt like that June date was a bigger opportunity for us globally. More screens, more IMAX screens, a better chance to play in China where these movies have a massive following. What we found when we released the trailer was that 44, 45 million views of the trailer were in China alone… Specific for us, it is an opportunity to be a bigger movie day-and-date globally."

So yeah, their reliance on China to boost the film's box office prospects doesn't really speak well to the film itself. Typically when a studio writes off a film domestically and puts all their eggs in China's basket, we end up with Geostorm or Warcraft. I don't know if you've seen either of those movies, but they're not good. Fingers crossed this is better, I guess.

Against all odds, X-Men: Dark Phoenix flies into theaters on June 7, 2019.