New Escapist Column! On “Dark Phoenix” Taking the X-Men Into the MCU…

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With New Mutants limping into cinemas this week and drawing the shutters down on the X-Men Cinematic Universe, it seemed like an appropriate opportunity to reflect on the dying days of a shared universe.

Dark Phoenix is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a fascinating one. It is a movie that embodies the strange listlessness of the X-Men franchise in the wake of X-Men: Days of Future Past, reflecting on the failed attempt to turn the series into a generic superhero franchise in X-Men: Apocalypse. It is a movie about the nightmare of stripping out any sense of identity from the merry mutants and packaging them as conventional and straightforward superheroes.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.