20th Century Fox have updated their 2018 and 2019 release schedule, and it didn’t take fan media long to spot two major changes. NEW MUTANTS and DARK PHOENIX, the next chapters in the X-Men universe, have both been delayed.
DARK PHOENIX, the follow-up to X-Men: Apocalypse, was due out on 2 November 2018 but has now moved to 14 February 2019.
THE NEW MUTANTS, an unusually horror based approach to the X-Men franchise, has been pushed back even further than its original delay. It’s now been pushed from 22 February 2019 all the way back to 2 August 2019.
It is not yet clear why Fox have moved the dates of these films. There were other moves on the schedule, of course, and regular release date changes are par for the course for every studio. (It makes keeping our Release Date page a real pain to keep updated). Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has been moved forward to November 2018, while the David Mamet/James Mangold film The Force has been shifted off the schedule completely.
Fox has spent the last few years tooling with the X-Men franchise. The award-winning Logan has been widely hailed as one of the most mature superhero films of the last few years, while the Deadpool franchise continues to break the fourth wall with regularity.
Maybe they are ensure the films are the best they can be. We quite enjoyed X-Men: Apocalypse for its unabashed comic bookery, but that was certainly not the critical consensus. Maybe New Mutants will joining the growing ranks of the Netflix graveyard. Only time will tell.
