X-Men Director Talks Alternate Dark Phoenix Storyline For Film Franchise

20^th Century Fox may have decided to re-explore the classic Dark Phoenix comic book storyline when it released X-Men: Dark Phoenix last year, however, the film wasn't in the least bit a success, striking out among fans and critics.

The first attempt at exploring the Dark Phoenix storyline was made when the studio released X-Men: The Last Stand, and that wasn't a success either.

Speaking during IGN's watch party for X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men movie producer and Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg decided to talk about how the X-Men film franchise might have been able to properly execute the Dark Phoenix story arc.

In Days of Future Past, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) finds himself in a rebooted version of the original X-Men trilogy timeline (including the events of The Last Stand), had been erased. The film featured special cameos from the franchise's original cast which included Famke Janssen as Jean Grey, Kelsey Grammar as Beast, and James Marsden as Cyclops.

According to Kinberg, this could have made room for a better exploration of the Dark Phoenix storyline.

"It's possible that... in the alternate universe... because it would've been about ten, fifteen years since The Last Stand, you could do Dark Phoenix with Famke. And you could do it with the Hellfire Club, and you could do it I think with the screen time it necessitates because it's such a complex storyline," the director explained during the watch party.

"You'd probably want a two-part movie: you'd want to bring the Hellfire Club in; you'd want it to be truly intergalactic; you'd want to bring in Lilandra; you'd want to really tell it that way," Kinberg continued, "And I think you'd need at least one bridge movie this [Days of Future Past] and the beginning of that [Dark Phoenix]. But the maturity of those actors and the history that goes back would've been 25 years - at this point (2014 when DoFP was released) 20 years since X1 - could've been really interesting."

Honestly, the X-Men film franchise has been a complicated one. It's such a shame that Kinberg failed to get the Dark Phoenix story right. Perhaps the director would be better off trying to think of an alternate story to the one he offered in Dark Phoenix last year.

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