Dark Phoenix Review: You’d think after 13 X-Men films, at least ONE would be about professional candle making, but NO - The Beaverton
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Dark Phoenix Review: You’d think after 13 X-Men films, at least ONE would be about professional candle making, but NO

With the release of its final X-franchise offering, has hammered the final nail into the of a franchise that has refused to accurately depict the time-honoured art of making, defying all common sense and the expectations of legions of disappointed fans.

Not everyone reads the as a metaphor for the decline of the candle making industry, with the 1879 invention of the incandescent , but given that Fox had already given Dark director Simon Kinberg a chance to tell this story with the poorly-received X3: The Last Stand, doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that he could have tried a different approach to the source material.

As fans have come to expect by this point, we see Jean Grey become the Phoenix, and once again we pick up up a decade after the previous film (this time it’s the 90s) but at no point does the film even mention the immense impact that so-called “glow-ball” candles had on that decade, nor the burgeoning resurgence of artisanal candle sales that was aided by the first -steps of the .

Instead, once again, we have to watch Xavier give speeches and Magneto be sad. How much more exhilarating would it have been to see the continuous production of molded candles made possible during the industrial revolution by a cylinder with a moveable piston that could eject candles as they solidified?

The sad truth is that with the rights of this franchise now reverting to , we may never know.