It feels like it’s been a long time coming, but X-Men: Dark Phoenix is almost here – and now we’ve finally got a trailer to prove it.
Pretty much everyone from X-Men: Apocalypse is returning, including Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, and Jennifer Lawrence – with the film focused on the character of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) as she flirts with evil.
We see Grey’s path to the dark side starting in childhood, and the trailer shows us plenty of the character’s emotional backstory along with her slow slide into madness.
“She’s all rage, pain, and it’s all coming out at once,” says Professor X in a voiceover, as Grey flips a car that kills her parents and starts wrecking havoc wherever she goes.
Siding with Grey is Jessica Chastain’s shapeshifting villain, “Smith”, but the trailer also suggests that Magneto is going fully bad again – clashing with Professor X over how to handle Grey.
After all the time-skipping, blue-faced bombast of Apocalypse, it’s nice to see the series grounding itself again with what looks like a much more emotional storyline. More importantly, the film already looks a lot better than X:Men: The Last Stand, which tried out the same storyline once already back in 2006 and ended up causing the whole series to reboot itself.
Dark Phoenix is directed by Simon Kinberg, who will make his debut after years as a writer and producer on the rest of the X-series, and the cast is rounded out by Nicholas Hoult (Beast), Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Evan Peters (Quicksilver) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (Night Crawler).
Pushed back up the release schedule alongside X-Men spin-off New Mutants, Dark Phoenix is now slated for a February 5th opening in the UK.