Simon Kinberg, the writer and director of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, has shared details about the film’s original ending and has explained the need for reshoots.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix didn’t have the smoothest path to cinemas in terms of its production, including the ending of the movie needing to be reshot. Writer-director Simon Kinberg has gone into detail about why this happened.
Speaking to io9, Kinberg explained the original ending wasn’t what he or test audiences wanted: “The reason I wanted to go back to reshoot things, though, was because this was meant to be the culmination of this family that’s grown together over however many movies, but it’s also a movie that tears that family apart. They’re facing a more serious trauma than they’ve ever seen before. The end of the movie really would have been more about the division between Charles and Scott with the rest of the X-Men. But one by one, the other X-Men side with Charles, and by the end, it’s just Scott by himself.
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“But in watching it myself and watching it with audiences during test screenings, the feeling was: if you’re going to put this family through all of these things, you’re going to want to see them united at the end. We never finished shooting that ending, but no matter how far along I got with it, it always felt like it was lacking closure and unity. That was really the impetus for the changes.”
There were reports that the film’s ending was changed due to similarities with Captain Marvel but Kinberg said the choice to reshoot was made before the latter film came out: “The truth is, I think a lot of the cast saw Captain Marvel, and then went off to do interviews, and sort of put two and two together. But the decision to reshoot what we reshot happened before Captain Marvel came out, and you know, I don’t have access to Marvel Studios’ planning process. Having said that, our original ending that I’d storyboarded did have things in common with the very end of Captain Marvel.”
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Of course, fans will have to make do with the ending that we have but who knows, perhaps further details or actual footage from the scrapped ending will one day make its way to audiences.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix sees Simon Kinberg directing a cast that includes franchise veterans Michael Fassbender (Magneto), James McAvoy (Professor X), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver) alongside new additions Kota Eberhardt (The Persian Connection) as Selene, Andrew Stehlin (Hacksaw Ridge) as Red Lotus, and Jessica Chastain (Molly’s Game) and Lamar Johnson (Kings).
Originally published June 13, 2019. Updated June 14, 2019.
