‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’ Pushed to 2019 and ‘New Mutants’ Delayed, Again
Is the Dark Phoenix storyline cursed? When the X-Men movies first attempted it in X-Men: The Last Stand, that movie was derided by both fans and critics as the nadir of the X-Men cinematic universe. They’re attempting it again with a new cast and a seemingly new approach, but X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which was supposed to hit theaters this November, has been pushed back to February 2019 in a Fox reshuffle that sees a number of movies trading release dates.
Late Monday night, per Deadline, Fox announced that X-Men: Dark Phoenix would not be arriving later this year, but would be coming out February 14, 2019. How romantic. The studio's Bohemian Rhapsody, which has been beset by its own set of behind-the-scenes troubles, has been moved from its planned Christmas Day release to take the place of Dark Phoenix's original release date, November 2.
Not only that, but The New Mutants, the horror-styled intro to a new generation of X-Men, has been pushed way back from February 22, 2019 to August 2, 2019. The New Mutants has been delayed before, originally set to come out this April before being bumped because of a series of reshoots to make the movie scarier and include an entirely new character. It sounds like the cast and crew are going to need a few more months to figure out how to make this one work.
There’s no telling what prompted all this moving around or whether we should be worried about the quality of any of these films because of it, but Fox seems to be feeling some pressure in the wake of the big Disney merger.
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