An IMAX exclusive trailer for Dark Phoenix goes back to the beginning of the franchise to show off the full X-Men saga from the first X-Men movie in 2000. We see Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy, Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender, and all the other mutants that have graced the big screen in the last 20 years, stuffed into preamble for the latest installment.
Aside from The New Mutants movie — which has been pushed back a couple of times now with a current release date of April 2020 — Dark Phoenix is rumored to be the last movie in the X-Men saga.
The concept is similar to one of the TV spots for Avengers: Endgame, which showed off the 10 years of Marvel Cinematic Universe culminating in one last showdown. The key difference is that instead of avenging those lost and defeating a Mad Titan, the X-Men go against one of their own: Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey (who they also went against in X-Men: The Last Stand, but this is a different Jean Grey, kinda).
Does a look back into the past of the franchise have as much emotional weight for Dark Phoenix as it did for Endgame? Word’s still out on just how the last X-Men movie delivers its final emotional punches, but Endgame did raise the bar.
On the nostalgia side, 20th Century Fox also released a more hefty lookback — less Dark Phoenix trailer, more sentimentality — where the cast members of the X-Men movies talk about the impact of the franchise and how it changed comic book movies.
Dark Phoenix hits theaters on June 7. Along with the IMAX trailer, Marvel also posted this new, throwback poster in the style of Steven Spielberg’s go-to artist, Drew Struzan.
