At New York Comic-Con 20th Century Fox invited ComingSoon.net to screen the opening 14-minutes of footage from next summer’s Dark Phoenix, with stars Sophie Turner and Tye Sheridan as well as producer Hutch Parker and screenwriter/director Simon Kinberg on hand to guide us through it. Check out the Dark Phoenix footage description below!
The footage opens with what looks like actual real-life footage from the 90’s of the now-retired NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour (1992-2011) taking off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center. Almost immediately the folks at mission control discover the ship is in trouble. We see footage of the President of the United States picking up a special X-Phone on his desk and ringing up Professor Charles Xavier with a mission to rescue the astronauts. The Professor assures Hank McCoy/Beast that the X-Jet can go into space with the new booster rockets they have installed.
We see the X-Men team seen in the last minute of X-Men: Apocalypse gather to launch the X-Jet into space, which includes Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, Nightcrawler, Quicksilver, Beast and team leader Mystique. “We’re doing space missions now… cool,” remarks Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver. There is an exchange of worry over the mission between Raven/Mystique (in her natural blue form) and Jean Grey…
JEAN: Are you okay with this?
MYSTIQUE: I forget sometimes you can read minds.
JEAN: I didn’t need to read your mind, it’s written all over your face. You tell me it’s good… it’s good.
MYSTIQUE: If anything goes wrong, I’ll turn us around in a heartbeat.
JEAN: I know you will.
Hans Zimmer’s intense score thrums as we see the X-Mansion’s basketball court open up and the X-Jet emerge and take off. Shots of people around the world watching the X-Men’s rescue mission on TV are shown before we see the jet break through the atmosphere and head into outer space. Meanwhile, Professor X is back home at the mansion connected to Cerebro so he can communicate with NASA mission control, who inform him that a solar flair has shorted out Endeavour, causing them to lose communication and control of the ship. “Don’t worry mission control, help is on the way,” says Charles.
Onboard the X-Jet the team looks nervous. Scott gently places a hand on Jean’s shoulder in the seat in front of him, and she reaches back to touch his hand, showing that their relationship has solidified since the last movie. Through the front windows of the jet the team sees Endeavour spinning wildly out of control next to a giant solar flair very close in proximity. There’s clearly not much time to extract the astronauts from the damaged shuttle.
Scott goes down to a lower deck of the ship where he positions his visor through an aiming device that allows him to blast the ship with a few carefully targeted eye beams, slowing down its rotation so Nightcrawler can teleport inside with Quicksilver and rescue the astronauts. Storm uses her powers to seal the cracks in the ship with ice, allowing her team members to breathe. Once the astronauts are safely onboard the X-Jet, Mystique orders Hank to take everyone home, but one of the astronauts explains their captain isn’t there because he was in the airlock working on the thruster. With the heat signature rising, Mystique decides it’s too dangerous, but Charles intervenes and orders them not to leave anyone behind, telling Jean to hold the shuttle together.
CHARLES: You know you can do anything you set your mind to.
JEAN: I can hold the ship together but not from here. I need to get inside.
With less than a minute before the flares hit the ship, Quicksilver speedily duck tapes a helmet to Nightcrawler so he can transport Jean to the Endeavor’s airlock. Nightcrawler manages to get the captain just before the flair hits, but Jean is left onboard. “Where’s Jean? WHERE IS SHE?” Scott yells. Everyone on the X-Jet looks on, terrified. The flair rips the ship apart and engulfs Jean in flames, but somehow she is able to absorb the energy inside her, taking the full force of it. Once the flare has disappeared Jean is brought back onboard the jet and Scott tends to her. Her eyes flicker open, but we see a subtle hint of orange energy in her eyes which vanishes, and she appears to be alright. “Is everybody okay?” Jean whispers. “Then let’s go home.”
The X-Jet lands on the tarmac in Florida, with both the astronauts and the X-Men received by a crowd giving them a hero’s welcome. People clearly love the X-Men, and there’s even a shot of a little girl holding a Mystique toy. This shot is repeated in a transition to the X-Mansion, where all the young students clap and cheer their comrades. Mystique/Raven has changed into her blonde/white-skin form for this scene, and the professor gives the whole school the day off to celebrate. Jean appears to be fine, but Charles tells Hank to examine her, just as a precaution. The Professor and Raven go into his office for a private chat that turns tense real quick as Charles’ cheery demeanor darkens as he pours himself a stiff drink.
Raven lectures him about how he put the kids in danger to serve his own ego. Charles counters that the X-Men are only one bad incident away from being despised, and he’s only making them do these heroic things so the public will love mutants. He wants to keep mutants safe.
“Its funny, I can’t remember the last time you were the one actually risking something,” says Raven. “And by the way, the women are always saving the men around here, you might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.”
Thus ended the footage.
“I was told about six months before we started shooting the movie,” Sophie Turner said of when she found out Jean Grey would essentially be the center of this new movie. “Simon took me to lunch, sat me down and told me what the movie was going to be, it was going to be ‘Dark Phoenix,’ what that meant for preparation. Luckily he gave me enough time to prepare. It was a big undertaking, a lot of pressure, but also such an honor because I know the fans are so in love with this storyline and I really think we did it justice.”
“After things start to unravel throughout the film, suddenly my character has lost the love of his life and she’s lost control of herself,” said Tye Sheridan of the film. “That’s a really hard thing to grasp. It splits the X-Men up and there’s a lot of conflict in this movie between the X-Men. You see a bit of fragility in Scott that you haven’t seen in past films, so that was really exciting for me.”
“It was great fun,” said Kinberg of making his directorial debut on Dark Phoenix. “I’ve been writing and producing for many many years now, and I’ve worked with many different filmmakers, not just on X-Men movies. There have been filmmakers that have needed an immense amount of help so I got to practice direct on some big feature movies with some directors who, let’s say, were very collaborative. I’ve also got to just sit back and watch people like Ridley Scott and Ken Branagh and Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn and lots of great filmmakers who treated me like a partner. So I learned a lot.”
Sheridan subtly threw his X-Men: Apocalypse director Bryan Singer under the bus, stating that Kinberg was “Definitely more engaged, focused all-around… for us it was just nice to have someone guiding us and leading us. It’s a big movie, you really need someone who can hone in on a vision and be really specific about every little detail. In this film Simon did such a great job, and we all believed in him so much… Overall this film was much more pleasing to make.”
RELATED: The Dark Phoenix Trailer is Here!
In Dark Phoenix, the X-Men face their most formidable and powerful foe: one of their own, Jean Grey. During a rescue mission in space, Jean is nearly killed when she is hit by a mysterious cosmic force. Once she returns home, this force not only makes her infinitely more powerful, but far more unstable. Wrestling with this entity inside her, Jean unleashes her powers in ways she can neither comprehend nor contain. With Jean spiraling out of control, and hurting the ones she loves most, she begins to unravel the very fabric that holds the X-Men together. Now, with this family falling apart, they must find a way to unite — not only to save Jean’s soul, but to save our very planet from aliens who wish to weaponize this force and rule the galaxy.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix will bring back much of the cast of the new films, which also includes Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique), Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler), Sophie Turner (Jean Grey), and Evan Peters (Quicksilver). Lamar Johnson of The Next Step has joined the cast in a mystery role and the mutant Dazzler will reportedly play a part in the film.
Simon Kinberg is writing and directing the film, marking his directorial debut. He will also produce alongside Lauren Shuler Donner and Hutch Parker. X-Men: Dark Phoenix is set to open in theaters on June 7, 2019.
