All the rumours you’ve heard in the past few months are true. Fox has set Simon Kinberg to make his directorial debut with 2018’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which will return much of the cast from 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse — and possibly add an Oscar nominee too.
Dark Phoenix is rising in 2018. Image: Marvel Comics
The Hollywood Reporter says that Jessica Chastain is in talks to play the villainous Lilandra, who’ll face the X-Men in a story that centres on Jean Grey’s incredible powers and transition into the Dark Phoenix.
Deadline reports those X-Men will be all familiar faces. Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Alexandra Shipp, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan and Kodi Smit-McPhee will all be back in their mutant roles.
Kinberg was rumoured to be Fox’s choice to direct back in February, but it wasn’t official until now. He’s written several of the previous X-films and produced almost all of them since X-Men: First Class rebooted the franchise. He’s hoping this film will be more in line with the original Dark Phoenix stories than its previous on-screen adaptation in X-Men: The Last Stand.
As for Lilandra, it’s unclear if her comic book origins and powers, which are much more cosmic than the X-Men films have been to date, will be true to form.
The film has a scheduled US release date of 2 November 2018, which puts it third on the list of upcoming X-movies. First will be Josh Boone’s New Mutants on 13 April 2018. Then there’s David Leitch’s Deadpool 2 on 1 June 2018, followed by Dark Phoenix.