Simon Kinberg Explains the DARK PHOENIX Date Change and PG-13 DEADPOOL

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Last week we got to see the first trailer for Dark Phoenix, the next film in the X-Men franchise. Originally Dark Phoenix was scheduled to come out in November of this year, but Fox decided to push it back to February 14th of 2019. Then, after the release of the trailer, the studio announced that it was moving the film to June 7th, 2019.

Simon Kinberg, writer and director of Dark Phoenix, explained the reasoning behind the second shift in scheduling in a recent chat with Collider, as well as what they’re working on:

“Both emotionally and in terms of the physical scale and the action of the third act that we adjusted. And then there were certain things in the first two acts of the movie – very few things, but to set up those changes in the third act we had to adjust some things in the first two acts so that all was fluid and felt consistent.

“Some of the trailers had ‘Coming Soon’ on them and some of them said ‘February 14th’. It was a date, February 14th, that we initially liked for the movie but when we realized that we weren’t gonna have the visual effects ready to release it globally the way we wanted to, and the ‘Gambit’ date opened up because it wasn’t gonna be ready for that June 7th date.

“We looked at that date versus the February 14th date, the studio did and we did, we felt like that June date was a bigger opportunity for us globally. So I would’ve still released a teaser when we released it, I just would’ve put ‘Coming Soon’ on the end of it or I would’ve put ‘June 7th’, though we hadn’t made that decision [at the time].”

Fox then announced that it was moving Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel from Christmas 2018, to the Valentine’s Day slot left open by Phoenix. So, what did Fox decide would be released at Christmas instead?

A PG-13 cut of Deadpool 2.

Here’s Kinberg explaining the motivation for this, and revealing that Ryan Reynolds is behind it:

“Ryan Reynolds and his studio—but I will give credit to Ryan Reynolds more than anyone else—is extraordinary at figuring out ways to get around the system. And be clever, both in terms of getting attention when it comes to viral stuff and in terms of deflecting attention when it comes to something like this. In the same way that Beyonce and Kanye can drop an album out of nowhere, Ryan figured out a way to drop a movie out of nowhere.”

I honestly don’t know what to expect here. Reynolds is very dedicated to giving fans what they want in Deadpool, and I don’t think he’d arbitrarily cut the hard R-rated Merc with a Mouth to a PG-13 just for some extra cash. Hell, if he wanted a cash grab he could have just asked Fox theatrically release the super-duper cut of the film. Obviously Reynolds ans the team behind Deadpool 2 have something up their sleeves. I guess we’ll have to wait a couple of months to see exactly what that is.

SOURCE: Collider