‘Dark Phoenix’ and ‘The New Mutants’ Will See Theatrical Release
During their CinemaCon presentation, Disney touched upon their acquisition of Fox and what it would mean for their film franchises. One thing that they made clear was that Fox’s final two X-Men movies, Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants, will be released in theaters as planned.
For a while, some have speculated that Disney may want to sweep the last two Fox movies under the rug to get a head-start on their new X-Men projects (which will be canon to the Marvel Cinematic Universe)… Ignoring that this would cause massive legal headaches that Disney would rather not deal with, since all the people hired to work on the movie would need financial compensation in exchange for Disney breaching their contract as the new owner of Fox. Later, the question shifted to the possibility that The New Mutants could be going to streaming, due to being the less expensive of the two releases and one that’s less likely to be treated as a moviegoing event. This would still create issues, but it seems like it was the easier of the two productions to not release theatrically.
Well, now it looks like both films are going to hit theaters, as Fox wanted. Fox’s Vice Chairman Emma Watts stated that Dark Phoenix is – in her eyes – “the perfect sendoff for our X-Men team”, confirming that the franchise as we know it is finished and a new iteration from Marvel Studios will arrive in a few years. Furthermore, The New Mutants was included on their release slate, which means that it will be released to theaters (as CinemaCon is held for theater chains and distributors, and not for streaming content). Watts also noted that, since they won’t be focused on making Marvel blockbusters – they’ll be deferring to Marvel Studios on that front – that gives them more room to allocate more resources toward making more original content and in-house franchises.
With this news also comes something that was expected, but was unspoken until now: the original X-Men film series will be discontinued, as previously reported. While some were hoping that Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants would get to lead into their planned trilogies, both are instead one-and-done installments. In the years ahead, the X-Men franchise will be redeveloped to fit the mold of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, alongside Fantastic Four and several other Marvel brands that Fox had the license to use. While the MCU was plenty successful without these characters, there are a number of concepts tied to the Fox characters that could vastly expand the scope of the setting.
With that said, one Fox-led Marvel franchise is moving forward as-is, and that’s (quite predictably) Deadpool. Ryan Reynolds is going nowhere, although he’ll need to set up a new contract now that the old one with Fox is effectively void now. The character’s first two films are explicitly set in continuity that’s not the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so Disney have two options: do a hard reboot now and put Deadpool in the MCU immediately, or continue the series to its logical conclusion in the existing continuity and have Deadpool show up in the MCU later. They’ve certainly got options, and they appear to be as R-rated as ever.
Dark Phoenix will be released on June 7, 2019. The New Mutants will be released on August 2, 2019.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
