Sophie Turner Is Now Officially the Future of the X-Men Franchise
By Joanna Robinson. Photos: Getty Images.
Fox today confirmed a number of suspicions that had been swirling around the next installment of the central X-Men franchise. For the foreseeable future, just like Cyclops, the mutants will be seeing red as Jessica Chastain joins Sophie Turner at the center of X-Men: Dark Phoenix.
Doubling down on the investment the studio made in Turner as head of the new class of mutants in X-Men: Apocalypse, the sequel is now, Deadline reports, officially subtitled Dark Phoenix—a reference to a famous comic storyline involving her powerful character, Jean Grey, breaking bad. It’s the same storyline X-Men explored with Famke Janssen as Jean Grey in the weakest installment of the franchise: The Last Stand. To lean in on a storyline from the least-loved X-Men film and draft Turner, whose debut in the franchise certainly didn’t make Apocalypse any better, is a risky choice. But Fox is full of gambles that pay off these days (see: Deadpool, Logan) and will shore up this foray into bold, new (yet familiar) territory with a trio of returning stars.
Michael Fassbender as Magneto, James McAvoy as Professor X, and Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique all fulfilled their three-picture contractual obligations to X-Men with 2016’s Apocalypse. There was some rumor that the reason Turner and the rest of the younger mutants like Tye Sheridan’s Cyclops, Alexandra Shipp’s Storm, and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Nightcrawler joined the cast in Apocalypse was to give the franchise a place to go if that core trio of Fassbender, McAvoy, and Lawrence didn’t return. But it looks like some kind of sweet deal was made after all; just don’t ask at what cost.
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Stepping into the villain role this time around is Chastain as Lilandra. It’s unclear if her role will follow that of the comics, in which the character is not really all that bad. She’s often a love interest for Charles Xavier and, yes, has to mop up the mess that is an uncontrollably powerful Jean Grey. But that makes her more reluctant disciplinarian than outright villain. We’ll see how far the film diverges from the source.
The last bit of rumor to be confirmed today is that Simon Kinberg, who co-wrote both The Last Stand and Apocalypse, will be handling director duties on the next installment in the Jean Grey saga. This will mark Kinberg’s directorial debut. Dark Phoenix is set to premiere in November of 2018, just a few months after the April 2018 release of the Maisie WilliamsX-Men spinoff New Mutants, part of Fox’s ever-expanding Mutant universe. Game of Thronesmay be taking 2018 off, but the Stark sisters will be as busy as ever.
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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