#X men phoenix movie series

What followed, according to several sources, was two weeks of principal shooting and three weeks of second unit, happening concurrently.įox executives were not concerned about the reshoots, which have become de rigueur for big superhero spectacles and are often built into contracts. Due to a cast that included in-demand actors such as Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jessica Chastain and Nicholas Hoult, the reshoots didn’t occur until October 2018. But during postproduction, Kinberg and Fox realized reshoots would be needed. Shooting began at the end of June 2017 and wrapped in October of that year. The entire group decided to re-up for one last outing. Kinberg’s work on Apocalypse won over the franchise’s A-list stars, whose three-film deals were up with that movie. However, he stepped behind the camera, to a lesser extent on Future Past, greater on Apocalypse, when director Bryan Singer would not show up on set, according to several sources. Kinberg became an architect of the franchise, but was not a director.

#X men phoenix movie series

Kinberg co-wrote Last Stand and resurfaced years later as a producer on 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which rebooted the series with a new cast and new time period. Fox then tapped Simon Kinberg to helm the movie. In some ways, it doubled down on what it had it went back to the cast from Apocalypse and then decided to tackle a story previously adapted in 2006’s X-Men: Last Stand, the Brett Ratner-directed entry generally considered among the worst in the franchise. With Dark Phoenix, Fox did not reboot X-Men. Others, such as Die Hard and Terminator, keep underperforming critically (if not commercially) no matter how persistently producers bring them back.

Some franchises, like Fast and Furious, have reinvented themselves with new concepts and a new cast.

“It’s a real head-scratcher on how you keep coming back,” says one studio executive, noting that even James Bond and Star Wars have had ups and downs. Hence the proliferation of reboots, reimaginings and ever grander cinematic universe ambitions. “We were wrong.”Īudience fatigue and erosion have hit even the most venerable franchises. “There was a misguided feeling that was an anomaly, that we just got it wrong,” says one Fox insider familiar with those meetings. Insiders tell The Hollywood Reporter that in a series of postmortem meetings on Apocalypse, execs came away thinking that the movie’s failure had been due to an excessive amount of explosions and scale, not due to franchise fatigue generally. But a series of missteps by the studio - some prompted by outside forces - came together to cause the failure.įrom the outset, it seemed that Fox, led by Stacey Snider and Emma Watts, and producers Simon Kinberg and Hutch Parker had learned the wrong lessons from the disappointing Apocalypse.

The tentpole was seen as a course corrective after X-Men: Apocalypse, the 2017 critical and fan failure that grossed $200 million less than the much-praised Days of Future Past two years earlier. Dark Phoenix was, in many ways, meant to be the ultimate X-Men movie.