Simon Kinberg Explains the Dark Phoenix Date Push

It would appear that the second date pushback for 20th Century Fox’s Dark Phoenix isn’t cause for panic, so says first-time director Simon Kinberg.

He very calmly and purposely explained to our friends over at Collider how the second release date (remember originally this film was set to open in November of 2018, when it still had “X-Men” in the title) of February 14th 2019 was “just a date”, and that the additional time to finish the film is important.

“Some of the trailers had ‘Coming Soon’ on them and some of them said ‘February 14th’. It was a date, February 14th, that we initially liked for the movie but when we realized that we weren’t gonna have the visual effects ready to release it globally the way we wanted to, and the Gambit date opened up because it wasn’t gonna be ready for that June 7th date.

We looked at that date versus the February 14th date, the studio did and we did, we felt like that June date was a bigger opportunity for us globally. More screens, more IMAX screens, a better chance to play in China where these movies have a massive following. What we found when we released the trailer was that 44, 45 million views of the trailer were in China alone… Specific for us, it is an opportunity to be a bigger movie day-and-date globally.”

Which makes sense, but- why did the newly released trailer still have the Valentine’s Day date then?

“In terms of the trailer release, it certainly probably shouldn’t have said 2/14 on it, but the audience—and certainly I know this because I live online as much as anybody—people wanted to see something from the movie, and it was time to share something from the movie. So I would’ve still released a teaser when we released it, I just would’ve put ‘Coming Soon’ on the end of it or I would’ve put ‘June 7th’, though we hadn’t made that decision [at the time].”

And about those reshoots, Kinberg said:

“I think any movie that has scale and, frankly, the wherewithal financially to do it does it. One of the many things that Marvel Studios does so brilliantly is they build into their budgets a reshoot period because the same way that writing a screenplay is an iterative process where you’re writing draft after draft, it makes sense—the way Marvel does it, the way Pixar does it—that making the movie is an iterative process as well, so you’re learning as you’re making the film, you’re learning as you’re editing the film what it needs.

Mostly we focused on the third act, both emotionally and in terms of the physical scale and the action of the third act that we adjusted. And then there were certain things in the first two acts of the movie—very few things, but to set up those changes in the third act we had to adjust some things in the first two acts so that that all was fluid and felt consistent.”

It’ll certainly be interesting to see how >this< writer’s favorite comic storyline translates when Dark Phoenix opens (eventually) in theaters June 7th 2019.