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Dark Phoenix... bumped... to February 2019 reportedly to give Kinberg more time for significant third-act reshoots.
If all goes smoothly with those, there's a good chance that Dark Phoenix will see the light of day next February as planned. But you can probably bank on the film being the last to feature the current cast headed by James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Sophie Turner, and others. Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios will almost certainly want to reboot the X-Men their way, with a whole new cast and introduction that will ignore all the X-Men movies that came before.
But if Dark Phoenix's release is delayed again and Marvel inherits it, one of three things could happen: Marvel goes forward with a standard (if perhaps somewhat more low-key) release; it dumps the picture into Disney's soon-to-come streaming service; or
least likely given its budget, it buries the movie in the vault and leaves it unreleased. Whatever happens, Dark Phoenix will serve, unintended or not, as the finale to the series of films started back in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men.
The New Mutants
This is the only other Fox Marvel movie that has actually been shot — although reportedly up to 50 percent of what director Josh Boone has already put in the can could be overhauled. That is what has led to The New Mutants being bumped twice, from last April to February 2019, and then again to November 2019.
That potentially puts the film — which is said to be a horror movie variation on the X-Men universe — right in the middle of the merger, which could result in several different fates for The New Mutants.
With the movie already just tangentially related to the larger X-Men series, Marvel could take over the project and retool it even further, removing all X-references and making it a straight horror movie about a bunch of kids with terrible new powers. The picture could be released with the public at large never knowing it was once an X-movie (although the fan community would know the truth).
Or, if that path is not available, Marvel could choose one of the options discussed for Dark Phoenix:
Put the movie on the Disney streaming service or not release it at all. Given its relatively lower cost compared to Dark Phoenix, those are more viable possibilities for this movie. We hope to somehow see it nonetheless, and hope it doesn't get lost along the way.
Deadpool 3 / X-Force
If there's any Fox Marvel character that's probably pretty safe right now, it's Deadpool. The Merc With a Mouth's first two movies have made more than $1.5 billion at the box office, the introduction of iconic characters like Cable (Josh Brolin) and Domino (Zazie Beetz) was warmly received by fans, and the formula for the movies — string together a relatively simplistic plot and let Ryan Reynolds do his thing — has clearly worked.
The hardest part is how to integrate the potty-mouthed, raunchy, hard-R antics of Wade Wilson into the decidedly PG-13 MCU. What the studio might do is keep Deadpool rolling along with just enough contact (a Deadpool cameo here, a guest Avenger there) to make it clear that everyone is now in the same continuum — sort of an expanded version of how the Deadpool movies have connected to the X-Men, in other words. Although there's no official word yet on Deadpool 3,
Drew Goddard was signed long ago to write and direct the long-awaited X-Force movie, and we have a feeling that Marvel Studios will stick with that plan.