Jon Watts directing the first movie in Simon Kinberg’s new Star Wars trilogy has fans zeroing in on one credit: Kinberg wrote and directed 2019’s Dark Phoenix.
Watts is mostly getting a pass thanks to his Spider-Man movies. The heat is on Kinberg.
Here is the part getting lost in the pile-on. The Dark Phoenix that bombed was not the movie Kinberg set out to make, something CBN covered back in June 2019 as reports detailed how the Disney purchase of Fox and Captain Marvel changed the film.
Star Wars Fans Zero In On Dark Phoenix
The trades confirmed the Watts news over the weekend, and the reaction on X went straight to the writer.
“Jon Watts directing… Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Dark Phoenix) writing… Brother,” posted one fan.
Another wrote that Watts makes crowd-pleasers when he has a good script, but “instead of a good writer, they chose Simon Kinberg.”
The numbers give fans plenty of ammo. Dark Phoenix opened to $33 million domestic and finished with $252.4 million worldwide on a $200 million budget.
Its 22% Rotten Tomatoes score is the lowest of any X-Men movie.
Dark Phoenix Was Supposed To Be Two Movies
Deadline’s postmortem on the bomb revealed Dark Phoenix was developed as a two-part movie.
Fox executives changed course late in pre-production and ordered it condensed into one film.
The release date then moved twice. Fox shifted the movie from November 2018 to February 14, 2019, and then again to June 7, 2019.
Per Deadline, the original plan was “to get out ahead of Captain Marvel” and beat Disney to the first Marvel movie led by a female superhero.
Captain Marvel got there instead. Brie Larson’s movie opened in March 2019 and crossed $1 billion, and the $71 billion Disney-Fox deal closed two weeks later.
By the time Dark Phoenix hit theaters that June, Disney was the studio releasing it.
Vanity Fair reported that merger turnover had gutted the Fox marketing operation, with temporary consultants filling jobs left by departed longtime employees.
The Ending Was Changed Because Of Captain Marvel
The third act audiences saw was not the original one. Dark Phoenix went through heavy reshoots that moved the finale from space to the train sequence in the theatrical cut.
James McAvoy told Yahoo the finale “had to change” because there was too much overlap with another superhero movie that had come out.
Michael Fassbender joked that the other production had spies on set and “basically stole our ideas.”
Neither actor named the movie. They didn’t have to.
The Skrulls Were Supposed To Be In Dark Phoenix
Kinberg’s original version did not use some obscure alien race. The villains were the Skrulls.
X-Men Cyclops actor Tye Sheridan confirmed the shape-shifting aliens were the original villains on the Reelblend podcast, walking through the scripted ending that got cut.
“[Charles and Scott] go to the U.N. because they’re going to try to tell the President that, ‘Hey, we’re under attack by aliens, and they’ve now captured Jean Grey.’
“And then Jean comes down in the front of the U.N., and causes… there is this huge battle between the guards at the U.N. and Jean Grey, and all the guards turn out to be Skrulls.”
Sheridan said the original version ended with Jean fighting off the Skrulls, blasting back into space, and saying goodbye to Scott and Charles.
The Skrulls are the same aliens Disney, Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige used in Captain Marvel three months earlier. If Dark Phoenix had kept its November 2018 release date, audiences would have met the Skrulls there first.
Leaked footage from the original cut and concept art later backed up the Skrull ending.
Leaks from viewers of the longer cut also claimed Jessica Chastain originally signed on to play Lilandra of the Shi’ar in the two-parter before her role was rewritten into the no-name alien Vuk.
Cutting the Skrulls also explains why the theatrical cut’s villain landed so flat. Chastain wasn’t even sure who she was supposed to play, and many of her lines come off screen, meaning they were added and changed later.
Kinberg pointed to Captain America: Civil War as the influence on his original ending, but admitted it “might have looked like Captain Marvel for about two minutes.”
The Dark Phoenix fans keep throwing at Kinberg is the theatrical cut. The two-part version he planned never got made, and the studio that changed his movie is the same one now handing him Star Wars.
The trilogy is still waiting on a greenlight from Disney, and reports have changed whether it’s a Skywalker Saga continuation with Daisy Ridley back as Rey, or about new characters.
Lucasfilm’s next big stage is Star Wars Celebration, April 1-4, 2027 in Los Angeles, and that is where an announcement on Kinberg and Watts would land.
