After both X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The Last Stand bombed with critics and at the box office, it seems that Jean Grey just can’t catch a break. But one of the comic book writers who helped created the original Dark Phoenix story says that while both movies had their problems, the former is still the better film.
Chris Claremont, the aforementioned writer, was one of the people responsible for bringing us the saga, which means his opinion is definitely one that should be heard, right? In a recent interview with Insider, he acknowledged that while each pic had issues, Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg still did the best he could.
“Simon wanted to do it as two films. One to make the audience fall in love with Jean and the other to break their hearts. But to do it in an hour and 50 minutes is a challenge. To his credit, despite a lot of outside interference from companies that will remain nameless, he pretty much got away with it.”
“As the co-creator of the source material, and as a colleague, I felt that Simon did the very best work possible within a whole bunch of contexts that were totally out of his control. It was a good film. It was way better than X-Men: The Last Stand.”
According to Claremont, it was a good film and way better than The Last Stand, but he’d still like to see his creation adapted again, just in a different format. A television miniseries, perhaps? Seeing how the Disney Plus streaming service will be kicking off this November, who knows? It just might happen.
In any case, we definitely know that the mutants are about to be rebooted under the watchful eye of Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios, but it’s unlikely they’ll be using the Dark Phoenix storyline again, given that we’ve already seen it twice and both times it failed to impress.
Tell us, though, what do you make of all this? Did you think X-Men: Dark Phoenix was better than The Last Stand? And would you be up for seeing the storyline used again in a future film or TV show? Let us know in the usual place below.