I personally haven’t been too excited about the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix film, primarily because, at this point, I don’t trust the Fox X-Men movies to consistently deliver. However, this new rumor from The Tracking Board’s Jeff Sneider could get me pretty excited to see the film (if it turns out to be true).
As always with these rumors, I’d like to emphasize that it is a rumor, so it may turn out to be entirely untrue. However, over on Popcorn Talk, The Tracking Board’s Jeff Sneider said, “We still don’t know who Jessica Chastain is playing [in X-Men: Dark Phoenix], do we? I heard a rumor this week. What if—and forget the pronouns here—what if Jessica Chastain was playing Mr. Sinister? That’s the rumor. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know who Mr. Sinister really is, but that’s a possibility. It’s a possibility.”
Mr. Sinister first debuted in Uncanny X-Men in the 1980s. Telepathic and virtually immortal, he’s also a master of genetics who tries to use the mutants’ DNA to reach the next, perfect stage of human evolution. He’s particularly obsessed with Cyclops/Scott Summers and the Summers family, and he once cloned Jean Grey. In comics continuity, he’s previously appeared as Miss Sinister, an extra body he made for his consciousness in case he died.
The idea of Chastain as Miss Sinister does match what we’ve heard so far. We already know that Chastain is playing a villain in the film. We know that she and Fox have been cagey about revealing who it is. We also know that she was attracted to the film because of its “many powerful female roles.” Back in November of 2017, after she publicly called out alleged predator and one-time Dark Phoenix producer Bryan Singer, she said that she wasn’t afraid to hold Singer to account, and that he certainly wasn’t what drew her to the film. “I actually chose to do X-Men because I’m working with Simon Kinberg,” she said, “who’s also a first-time filmmaker who I met on The Martian, and is an incredible writer and producer. He wrote this script—which I can’t say much about, because it’s X-Men—and there are many powerful female roles in this story that Simon is telling.”
A female version of an iconic X-Men villain would certainly qualify as a “powerful female role.”
In addition, Fox announced delayed release dates for both Dark Phoenix and New Mutants at around the same time. And The Tracking Board also recently reported that “Jon Hamm was originally going to appear as Mr. Sinister in a tag at the end of New Mutants, and [director Josh] Boone filmed material that led up to that reveal, only for Fox to change their minds after shooting had been completed.”
Perhaps they changed their mind because they wanted Chastain as Sinister instead? Or perhaps this means Chastain couldn’t possibly have been cast as Sinister, if they were still filming Hamm in the role that late in the game? You can draw your own conclusions.
After being delayed, X-Men: Dark Phoenix is now scheduled to open on February 14, 2019.
(via CBR; image: ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images)
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