We already know that Deadpool 2 is hitting right in the heart of blockbuster season, but that’s not the only X-Men movie we’ll be seeing next year.
Just two months earlier, on April 13, Fox is set to release director Josh Boone’s The New Mutants, which is being billed a young-adult take on Marvel’s huge cast of mutant characters. Expect lots of out-of-control powers and out-of-control feelings.
In Fall of 2018, though, Fox is set to release X-Men: Dark Phoenix, featuring the cast seen most recently in X-Men: Apocalypse.
There’s a lot of history here
Now, if you hear groaning coming from any comic book fans nearby, it’s because they know this is a sort of remake of the poorly-received X-Men: The Last Stand. That film featured the previous X-Men cast, centered around Jean Grey’s transformation into the Phoenix, a massively powerful psychic that has the capability to destroy the X-Men and much more. The movie had tons of potential, but a shift in director from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner and a scrambled, confusing plot did it no favors.
With this new crop of mutant movies delving far deeper into the lore than the previous series, there’s potential for a do-over of the Dark Phoenix saga with greater faithfulness to the source material. With Jean Grey going out into space and causing supernovas and such, that might still be difficult to pull off, but we can hope.
The two things working against it are X-Men: The Last Stand‘s poor reception and the even-poorer reception of last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. A shift away from Jennifer Lawrence and a focus on Game of Thrones‘ Sophie Turner, returning as Jean Grey, could work in its favor, though. We’ll know next fall.
