It’s been nearly 20 years since Marvel Comics’ The X-Men — about super-powered mutants, some of whom are good and some of whom are not so much — first reached the screen. Since then, there have been a total of 11 films set in that universe, two more on the way, and, currently, two live action television series. The next film will be February’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix, starring Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jessica Chastain, the trailer for which has just been released. 

Check out the trailer below!

Dark Phoenix picks up in the aftermath of X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). Writing and directing is Simon Kinberg, who has been heavily involved with this franchise, Michael B. Jordan’s Fantastic Four, and Star Wars for a number of years. All of which he admits is pretty mind-blowing, particularly given the diversity in X-Men projects (including Hugh Jackman’s Logan and Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool).

“I grew up loving all these things,” he enthuses in a previously unposted interview. “I grew up reading comics. I would say Star Wars, even in my personal life, is probably the most seminal experience of my childhood. There’ll be times when I’m just fully immersed in writing or in making a movie and you’re just telling the story. And then there are times when it hits me, whether it’s a moment that I remember reading from a comic when I was a kid or what feels like a seminal moment for these characters that I grew up with. There are many moments like that and sometimes they’re obvious. When we shot our first scene with Apocalypse on X-Men: Apocalypse, I had this moment when I saw Oscar Isaac, who played the character, kind of finishing getting into the suit. He caught me looking at him and we each had this moment where we were looking maybe 30 or 40 feet away from one another. There was just this nod that he gave me and I nodded back, and I was just thinking to myself, ‘Holy crap, I’m looking at Apocalypse. And I wrote the lines that are going to come out of his mouth.’ I have lots of moments like that for sure.

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“When I was growing up,” Simon continues, “I could not have imagined that there would be a world in which you could have two or three X-Men movies coming out in the same year. But having said that, I would read tons of X-Men stories in a span of a single year when I was a kid and there are so many great characters and really resonant characters that it does offer itself up to multiple movies. One of the things we’re really trying to do from movie to movie is create different voices, so it doesn’t just feel like they’re all of a piece. Obviously they live in the same universe and adhere to similar rules and acknowledge the events of the different movies, but Deadpool is a hard ‘R’ sort of comedic darker film than the X-Men movies. Gambit [in development] is a fun, different tone; a New Orleans swaggering movie. It will feel very different from any X-Men movie you’ve seen before. Wolverine has his own entirely unique vibe to him. What director James Mangold did with the last Wolverine movie, Logan, is also a different tone from the other Wolverine movies or any of the X-Men movies. It’s almost more like a Clint Eastwood Western than anything else. So in a very concerted and conscious way, we’ve been trying to make each of these different iterations feel like a unique experience, even though they exist within the same universe.” 

X-Men: Dark Phoenix will be released on Feb. 14, 2019