Summer is coming! And Sansa Stark Sophie Turner, having hung up her Winterfell robes for good, is gearing up for her next star turn as Yung Jean Grey in June’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. The would-be tentpole marks the first installment in the X-Men film franchise since the property was re-integrated into the Marvel Studios sphere, following Disney’s 71.3 billion USD acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s best IP in March.
Evil monopoly, etc etc, but I’ll be damned if Disney hasn’t put out some stunning poster art targeting the Chinese market for their juggernaut-like (heh) onslaught of big-budget box office behemoths:
And here’s the latest in this tradition, a Dunhuang-esque poster for Dark Phoenix, because, well, phoenixes can be Chinese too, right?
The X-Men franchise has tiptoed around China before. 2014’s Days of Future Past (lowkey the best one, don’t @ me) begins with a Sinofuturist flourish as a fleet of killer AI robots bears down on Prof X, Magneto and co. in a rustic Chinese mountain temple circa 2023. (Fan Bingbing was pretty cool in that one, even if the only thing she did was die.) Deadpool 2 got a truncated, Chinese-censor-friendly PG13 edit in January, and Dark Phoenix hits Chinese theaters on June 6, one day before its US release.
Disney doesn’t own Star Trek (yet) but it’s certainly gearing up to assimilate all known forms of entertainment, Borg-like, with the November launch of its new streaming service, Disney+. No way that’ll ever get the green light to be released in China, but at the very least let’s hope we can get some more cool crossover posters. Like, say, Homer Simpson on the Great Wall? Darth Vader in a qigong battle with Shang-Chi? The possibilities are (almost literally) endless!
