Director Simon Kinberg: X-Men Dark Phoenix is “A Female-Centered Story”
X-Men: Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg bluntly stated that the film is a “female-centered story.”
Kinberg revealed the focus of the film in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He elaborated on why he describes the film as a “female-centered story.”
“More than anything, it’s a female-centered story because we have a female protagonist in Jean. I didn’t want to shortchange that. I thought part of what happened in X-Men: The Last Stand is that instead of making it a Jean story, it became a story of the cure, which was really Charles and Erik and Wolverine’s story, and I really wanted this to be Jean’s story. She is the dominant character in this movie.”
He would continue:
“And you’re right, the other dominant characters are Mystique and Jessica Chastain’s characters, and Storm is stronger than she’s been before. Part of what I always loved about the X-Men is they have incredibly strong female characters, and I just thought it was time to help that come to the fore in the movie universe too.”
Not only will the film focus on Jean Grey and the Phoenix, with Jessica Chastain’s character looking to play antagonist, but the film will also introduce one of the most powerful female members of the Hellfire Club.
And while the film will definitely have a focus on Jean Grey and the Phoenix, it doesn’t look like Charles Xavier and Magneto will be brushed to the side. In fact, it still looks like they will play pivotal roles in the film as Magneto appears to directly confront the Phoenix Force empowered Jean Grey as seen in the latest trailer.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix will come out on June 7th, but it was originally slated to debut last November. In fact, the movie’s release date was pushed back multiple times with many believing there could be problems with the movie.
Kinberg explained why the movie was pushed back:
“Well it was a combination of things. One, November was always a very ambitious release date for us, given how many visual effects and how complex the visual effects in this film were going to be. When we felt like we weren’t going to be able to complete the movie to the level we wanted to complete it from a visual effects standpoint, we considered moving it from November to February.”
He then explained why they pushed it back into June:
“Then, because of the way the international calendar was for us and how fast we could get materials to other territories, we felt like February became not just challenging, but not necessarily the best window internationally for the film. It’s very close to Captain Marvel. The studio started to feel that the movie was so massive in scale that it could compete in the most competitive time for films, which is summer. So we started looking at the potential for summer dates, and June 7 stood out as a date we could have for ourselves. It’s however many weeks after Avengers, so there will not have been a comic book movie for a little while, and our hope is that people will be excited about seeing another one.”
Are you looking forward to X-Men: Dark Phoenix? What do you make of Kinberg’s comments about the focus of the story?
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