A mere day after the long-awaited debut of the first trailer for Dark Phoenix, Fox delayed the release of the X-Men sequel, again, this time from Feb. 14, 2019, to June 7, 2019. That, of course, triggered another round of hand-wringing, but director Simon Kinberg assures there’s a perfectly good reason behind the decision.
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“Some of the trailers had ‘Coming Soon’ on them and some of them said ‘Feb. 14,’” he told Collider. “It was a date, Feb. 14, 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 7 date.”
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“We looked at that date versus the Feb. 14 date, the studio did and we did, we felt like that June date was a bigger opportunity for us globally,” Kinberg continued. “More screens, more IMAX screens, a better chance to play in China where these movies have a massive following. What we found when we released the trailer was that 44, 45 million views of the trailer were in China alone. … Specific for us, it is an opportunity to be a bigger movie day-and-date globally.”
Written and directed by franchise veteran Simon Kinberg, Dark Phoenix stars James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters and Jessica Chastain,. The film opens June 7, 2019.