Insomniac’s Spider-Man for PS4 is a very good game. Some would go so far as to call it great. This group apparently includes the Marvel executives who compared the game to the 2008 Iron Man film that kickstarted the now mythical Marvel Cinematic Universe. That comparison has naturally inspired some to consider the increasingly likely possibility that Marvel may use Spider-Man as the basis for a Marvel games universe. 

I sincerely believe that Spider-Man can be the solid foundation for a Marvel gaming universe. However, if Marvel is serious about it, the company needs to learn from the mistakes it made when it built its cinematic universe. 

When you look back at the MCU, it’s pretty obvious that things didn’t really get cooking until the later phases. That doesn’t mean that the movies in phase one were terrible. Iron Man was incredible, Captain America: The First Avenger was at least interesting, and The Avengers was revolutionary. However, phase one (and two) also contain some pretty big misfires.

Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World… if there’s one thing that unites the creative failures of that time period it’s complacency. When Iron Man became a surprise critical and box office hit, Marvel undoubtedly took some time to think about what it had on its hands and why it worked. 

In the process, the studio did what every company on Earth does when it finds success: they tried to do the same thing again. Many of those early MCU movies suffered because they followed a set formula of action, visual design, and dialogue/plot structure that resulted in diminishing returns. Marvel mistakenly believed that the name value of its characters was enough to keep the gravy train on its tracks. What the studio didn’t seem to realise – or appreciate – at the time was that Iron Man was widely successful because it was different from all the comic book films that came before it, and because it was good. 

I mention this in relation to the theoretical Marvel games universe because it’s already easy to see how Marvel could become complacent with what Spider-Man delivered. I really liked Spider-Man, but the reason I didn’t necessarily love Spider-Man is that it played things very safe. Its core design was very similar to 2018’s God Of War in many respects, which was, itself, very similar to many other games released over the past few years. If the Assassins Creed and Arkham Asylum games didn’t go through all the trial and error first, we wouldn’t have Spider-Man at all. 

Large worlds, lots of side quests/collectibles, upgrade systems, gradual map unlocking – all of these aspects can be good on their own, but the problem is that more and more developers are combining them in a very specific way that’s resulted in the same basic product. Insomniac threw in a few special ingredients (Spidey’s charm, an excellent web-slinging system, a very good story), but the developer ultimately chose to adhere to a somewhat strict formula regardless of whether or not certain elements (radar towers, lengthy stealth sections, several upgrade options) really belonged in the game. 

It would be very easy for Marvel to point to Spider-Man and tell Insomniac, or another developer, “we want this game, but with Iron Man/Thor/Captain America/the Incredible Hulk.” And those games would probably sell very, very well. After all, even most of the “bad” MCU movies made a fortune at the box office. What’s going to happen eventually, though, is the same thing that happened with the MCU and the same thing that’s currently happening with the DCEU (to a certain extent). Fans are going to start mistrusting the value of the universe if it starts to deliver experiences that are similar to – but not as refreshing as – the game that kicked the whole thing off. 

Fortunately, Marvel already knows the solution to this problem because it’s already used it to save the MCU. The studio just needs to make sure that “MGU” titles represent the voices of their creators.

Much like Taika Waititi lent Thor: Ragnarok an almost anime-like world and scale, let Devolver Digital produce a Deadpool game worthy of the hero’s passion for the absurd. Just as James Gunn turned sharp dialogue and perfectly placed music into lethal weapons in Guardians Of The Galaxy, let Naughty Dog make a Captain America game that captures the hero’s almost film serial-like sense of adventure. Let Blizzard make an X-Men action game, let Ninja Theory take a stab at Daredevil, and let Epic Games have a crack at the Incredible Hulk. 

Marvel needs to give multiple studios the chance to leave their own creative mark on the Marvel games universe. Granted, that’s a scary path that could lead to failure. We’ve already seen Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite struggle, Telltale’s Guardians Of The Galaxy was a bit of a bust, and there’s still that mysterious Square Enix Avengers project we’re waiting to hear more about. There are enough reasons for Marvel to be wary of allowing multiple studios to pitch so many ideas.

However, just as movies like Black Panther, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Avengers: Infinity War set new standards for the MCU by reflecting a particular creator’s skills and sensibilities, Marvel needs to trust other game studios the way that it trusted Insomniac. The company needs to believe that multiple, capable creative voices have more long-term value than the repetition of a formula. Otherwise, you get EA and Star Wars. 

I liked Insomniac’s Spider-Man, but I hope I don’t see too many other Marvel games like it. 

Warning: contains spoilers for anyone not up to date

It’s not often you get a chance to speak to royalty. The first appearance of The Walking Dead‘s very own King Ezekiel, Khary Payton, marked a turning point, not just in terms of opening up the world that Rick and company inhabited, but from a visual standpoint too. It embraced the comics’ aesthetic and the outlandish concept of a ruling monarchs with a pet tiger. Outlandish, but also fantastic.

That Ezekiel has worked so well on the small screen is down to Khary Payton’s pitch perfect performance, making him at once majestic, grounded and tragic. The character’s dichotomy has made him a compelling addition, with season eight finally breaking his kingly façade after a slew of heart breaking losses. By contrast our phone interview found Mr. Payton in fine spirits and full of enthusiasm – when I disclaimed that it was the middle of the day in my office, with the possibility of background noise, he exclaimed “I’m all about the background noise man, let’s make it a party!” and with that we were off…

I love Ezekiel and the way that you’ve brought the character to life. It was making me laugh that for this interview there was a part of me that wanted to refer to you as “Majesty”!

You know, it’s very funny because being cast as Ezekiel, I have so many friends of mine who just won’t stop doing that. It’s not just people who are fans or whatever, it’s literally like my boys would be “My King! What’s up?” and I was like “Dude! Why are you calling me that!?” I think it’s fun for people to have an excuse to have a friend – who you don’t hate! [laughs] – that you can have this kind of nickname for, because I get it so much. A friend of mine that I’ve been working with for, I don’t know, twenty years or something and at this point it’s always “My King” and he’s kind of eccentric anyway, but now that he can call me ‘King’ I can’t get him to call me Khary ever again. He’s just like “My King! Hey, wassup my King!” 

That’s awesome, because I did wonder if people would take advantage of that situation!

I guess it links itself to the whole idea of why Ezekiel did it in the first place, you know? People enjoy it. Anytime you get to have a kinship with royalty, whether it’s real or imagined, I guess is a fun thing.

People just look for it, as they want to feel like there’s some type of guidance and leadership, especially in the world of The Walking Dead. 

Exactly. And, at the end of the day, royalty is a man-made construct, you know? There’s some royal lines that have been around for thousands of years, but it had to start somewhere! So I guess this royalty literally starts with Ezekiel, there you go.

I think the thing I love most about the character is that there is such a duality to him and what’s so tragic is that his ‘real’ self, as it was before the apocalypse, remains hidden for the majority of the time. What kind of challenge does that present to you, in terms of how to balance the two sides of him in your performance? 

Well, I feel like there’s a hidden side to him, but there’s also – you know what they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” and this thing comes out because of a necessity. The funny thing is that sometimes I try to relax the way Ezekiel’s talking, but I can’t because I’ve been doing it too long this way, you know? When I start to do Ezekiel, it just becomes a part of my cadence and I feel like that’s kind of what happened with Ezekiel, is that every once in a while he will drop it, but he has to make a concerted effort to stop because he’s been doing it this way for so long, it’s not just this thing that he puts on, it’s this thing that he’s put on so long ago that’s become a part of him.

Kind of like if you were to move to another part of the world, like I hear people who grew up in Britain and then they move to the States and then they move back and everybody says “Well, you don’t talk quite like either one, you’ve got this way of talking that’s entirely your own” and they slip into it and they can’t really slip out. I feel like that’s where Ezekiel is now. 

That makes a lot of sense, like a new reality where you would lose your old self almost entirely. I always think of that early encounter with Carol, where the two of them were sat together and it was one of those rare moments where he did soften properly for a moment.

Yeah, yeah. I think it takes a certain amount of relaxation for him to do that. That he has to consciously take the ropes off. It’s not just something that he can just snap out of. It is such a mechanism for him, a survival mechanism and especially a survival mechanism is not something you can just switch off so easily. 

Season eight was a really great one for Ezekiel, because he went through such extreme highs and lows. Was it a thrill to have the character hit rock bottom and to play that out? 

Yeah, it was an incredible experience and I really am thankful that [Robert] Kirkman wrote that storyline into the comics and that we translated it. I think honestly my favourite episode that I’ve done is probably episode four, Some Guy, and although it was a gut-wrenching episode and it was a couple of weeks of shooting, it was also one of the most gratifying and one of my proudest moments just as far as my acting career is concerned, because he did go from this high to such a low.

He has that speech at the beginning of the episode and is immediately crushed back down to earth and to be able to play all those highs and lows all in one episode and to be able to take a show like The Walking Dead, where it’s such a phenomenon and to be given an episode where they kind of just put it on your shoulders and ask you to run with it, was an amazing experience and amazing feeling. And although we lost Shiva, and Ezekiel lost so much of himself and his people, it was also like an incredibly wonderful artistic experience. 

Ezekiel and Shiva were one of my favourite dynamics on the show, so it must have been really surreal to mourn a character that was never really there as an actor, because for me as a viewer the tiger is real and I’m invested.

Yeah, it’s funny, to me the more dramatic thing was losing most of The Kingdom warriors on the show, that was the thing that impacted me most of all, but I’ve always thought of Shiva as kind of the embodiment of what The Kingdom is, she’s this magnificent creature, maybe one of the last of her kind and she’s this brilliantly coloured, beautiful thing that’s left in this apocalypse surrounded by death and I feel like The Kingdom itself was kind of the same thing.

So, when I lost all of the people, that was my losing Shiva, so when I saw Shiva being devoured by the zombies it was seeing all of those people that I’ve been working with for like a year and I’m not going to be working with them anymore, they’re all dead and they’re gone! So it really impacted me because even the extras, the people who don’t actually say anything in The Kingdom, they all really brought their A-games every time we worked together and I always appreciated their commitment to telling the story in their own ways and giving me whatever I needed, whenever I looked them in the eye. So Shiva dying really was about The Kingdom dying for me.

Having spoken to a lot of your fellow cast members throughout the years I’ll often ask “What about this loss, or that loss?” and it’s normally about one character, but you lost almost everyone in one hit. 

It was pretty gut-wrenching – there was a shot of me coming into The Kingdom after it was all over and seeing the remanence there and the first time I walked through I just bawled, like it was an ugly cry, it was way too much. But I think it was because I was seeing the faces of mothers and fathers and I was coming to tell them that they had lost their families and it was like “Woah, this is heavy”. And personally, I just loved The Kingdom as a construct on The Walking Dead, I think if you had to have a place where you’re going to live, people would come knocking on The Kingdom’s door, if people were trying to enjoy their life, not just survive it. 

Yeah, definitely. Well I think we’ve run out of time.

Sure, sure, I talk a lot man!

No, it’s great, that’s nothing worse than the opposite! I’m fingers crossed for Ezekiel in season nine and while you probably can’t say anything about it, I’m hopeful for him. 

I’m so excited that we are so close to finally getting this season off the ground, because I think everybody is going to be blown away, the premiere is going to hit and I think everybody is going to be like ‘Wow, that’s something wild that’s brewing.’ I can’t wait for everybody to see it!

Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time. 

No problem, man. Take care now.

The Walking Dead the complete eighth season is available on Blu-ray™ and DVD from 24th September 2018, courtesy of Entertainment One.

Warning: contains spoilers for anyone not up to date

It’s not often you get a chance to speak to royalty. The first appearance of The Walking Dead‘s very own King Ezekiel, Khary Payton, marked a turning point, not just in terms of opening up the world that Rick and company inhabited, but from a visual standpoint too. It embraced the comics’ aesthetic and the outlandish concept of a ruling monarchs with a pet tiger. Outlandish, but also fantastic.

That Ezekiel has worked so well on the small screen is down to Khary Payton’s pitch perfect performance, making him at once majestic, grounded and tragic. The character’s dichotomy has made him a compelling addition, with season eight finally breaking his kingly façade after a slew of heart breaking losses. By contrast our phone interview found Mr. Payton in fine spirits and full of enthusiasm – when I disclaimed that it was the middle of the day in my office, with the possibility of background noise, he exclaimed “I’m all about the background noise man, let’s make it a party!” and with that we were off…

I love Ezekiel and the way that you’ve brought the character to life. It was making me laugh that for this interview there was a part of me that wanted to refer to you as “Majesty”!

You know, it’s very funny because being cast as Ezekiel, I have so many friends of mine who just won’t stop doing that. It’s not just people who are fans or whatever, it’s literally like my boys would be “My King! What’s up?” and I was like “Dude! Why are you calling me that!?” I think it’s fun for people to have an excuse to have a friend – who you don’t hate! [laughs] – that you can have this kind of nickname for, because I get it so much. A friend of mine that I’ve been working with for, I don’t know, twenty years or something and at this point it’s always “My King” and he’s kind of eccentric anyway, but now that he can call me ‘King’ I can’t get him to call me Khary ever again. He’s just like “My King! Hey, wassup my King!” 

That’s awesome, because I did wonder if people would take advantage of that situation!

I guess it links itself to the whole idea of why Ezekiel did it in the first place, you know? People enjoy it. Anytime you get to have a kinship with royalty, whether it’s real or imagined, I guess is a fun thing.

People just look for it, as they want to feel like there’s some type of guidance and leadership, especially in the world of The Walking Dead. 

Exactly. And, at the end of the day, royalty is a man-made construct, you know? There’s some royal lines that have been around for thousands of years, but it had to start somewhere! So I guess this royalty literally starts with Ezekiel, there you go.

I think the thing I love most about the character is that there is such a duality to him and what’s so tragic is that his ‘real’ self, as it was before the apocalypse, remains hidden for the majority of the time. What kind of challenge does that present to you, in terms of how to balance the two sides of him in your performance? 

Well, I feel like there’s a hidden side to him, but there’s also – you know what they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” and this thing comes out because of a necessity. The funny thing is that sometimes I try to relax the way Ezekiel’s talking, but I can’t because I’ve been doing it too long this way, you know? When I start to do Ezekiel, it just becomes a part of my cadence and I feel like that’s kind of what happened with Ezekiel, is that every once in a while he will drop it, but he has to make a concerted effort to stop because he’s been doing it this way for so long, it’s not just this thing that he puts on, it’s this thing that he’s put on so long ago that’s become a part of him.

Kind of like if you were to move to another part of the world, like I hear people who grew up in Britain and then they move to the States and then they move back and everybody says “Well, you don’t talk quite like either one, you’ve got this way of talking that’s entirely your own” and they slip into it and they can’t really slip out. I feel like that’s where Ezekiel is now. 

That makes a lot of sense, like a new reality where you would lose your old self almost entirely. I always think of that early encounter with Carol, where the two of them were sat together and it was one of those rare moments where he did soften properly for a moment.

Yeah, yeah. I think it takes a certain amount of relaxation for him to do that. That he has to consciously take the ropes off. It’s not just something that he can just snap out of. It is such a mechanism for him, a survival mechanism and especially a survival mechanism is not something you can just switch off so easily. 

Season eight was a really great one for Ezekiel, because he went through such extreme highs and lows. Was it a thrill to have the character hit rock bottom and to play that out? 

Yeah, it was an incredible experience and I really am thankful that [Robert] Kirkman wrote that storyline into the comics and that we translated it. I think honestly my favourite episode that I’ve done is probably episode four, Some Guy, and although it was a gut-wrenching episode and it was a couple of weeks of shooting, it was also one of the most gratifying and one of my proudest moments just as far as my acting career is concerned, because he did go from this high to such a low.

He has that speech at the beginning of the episode and is immediately crushed back down to earth and to be able to play all those highs and lows all in one episode and to be able to take a show like The Walking Dead, where it’s such a phenomenon and to be given an episode where they kind of just put it on your shoulders and ask you to run with it, was an amazing experience and amazing feeling. And although we lost Shiva, and Ezekiel lost so much of himself and his people, it was also like an incredibly wonderful artistic experience. 

Ezekiel and Shiva were one of my favourite dynamics on the show, so it must have been really surreal to mourn a character that was never really there as an actor, because for me as a viewer the tiger is real and I’m invested.

Yeah, it’s funny, to me the more dramatic thing was losing most of The Kingdom warriors on the show, that was the thing that impacted me most of all, but I’ve always thought of Shiva as kind of the embodiment of what The Kingdom is, she’s this magnificent creature, maybe one of the last of her kind and she’s this brilliantly coloured, beautiful thing that’s left in this apocalypse surrounded by death and I feel like The Kingdom itself was kind of the same thing.

So, when I lost all of the people, that was my losing Shiva, so when I saw Shiva being devoured by the zombies it was seeing all of those people that I’ve been working with for like a year and I’m not going to be working with them anymore, they’re all dead and they’re gone! So it really impacted me because even the extras, the people who don’t actually say anything in The Kingdom, they all really brought their A-games every time we worked together and I always appreciated their commitment to telling the story in their own ways and giving me whatever I needed, whenever I looked them in the eye. So Shiva dying really was about The Kingdom dying for me.

Having spoken to a lot of your fellow cast members throughout the years I’ll often ask “What about this loss, or that loss?” and it’s normally about one character, but you lost almost everyone in one hit. 

It was pretty gut-wrenching – there was a shot of me coming into The Kingdom after it was all over and seeing the remanence there and the first time I walked through I just bawled, like it was an ugly cry, it was way too much. But I think it was because I was seeing the faces of mothers and fathers and I was coming to tell them that they had lost their families and it was like “Woah, this is heavy”. And personally, I just loved The Kingdom as a construct on The Walking Dead, I think if you had to have a place where you’re going to live, people would come knocking on The Kingdom’s door, if people were trying to enjoy their life, not just survive it. 

Yeah, definitely. Well I think we’ve run out of time.

Sure, sure, I talk a lot man!

No, it’s great, that’s nothing worse than the opposite! I’m fingers crossed for Ezekiel in season nine and while you probably can’t say anything about it, I’m hopeful for him. 

I’m so excited that we are so close to finally getting this season off the ground, because I think everybody is going to be blown away, the premiere is going to hit and I think everybody is going to be like ‘Wow, that’s something wild that’s brewing.’ I can’t wait for everybody to see it!

Awesome. Well thank you so much for your time. 

No problem, man. Take care now.

The Walking Dead the complete eighth season is available on Blu-ray™ and DVD from 24th September 2018, courtesy of Entertainment One.

There’s a lot riding on X-Men: Dark Phoenix. For a start, the release has been delayed long enough now that we’re starting to worry about it – especially since the reports of reshoots have been tied to the stories of even bigger setbacks for New Mutants. 

What’s more, since Fox got gobbled up by Mickey Mouse a few months ago, Dark Phoenix will likely be the final film in a series continuity that stretches back to 2000 – pretty much since before superhero movies were even a thing. Whatever happens next will either pick up the New Mutants strand, carry on Deadpool’s X-Force trajectory or, more likely, be rebooted somewhere into the MCU.

This is the end of an era – with Simon Kinberg making his directorial debut to finish what Bryan Singer started and what Matthew Vaughn saved. There may have been a few ups and downs along the way, but whatever is about to happen in Dark Phoenix is going to put a cap on one of the most exciting, influential, genre defining franchises around. 

But how much did the trailer really tell us? Quite a bit actually.

Potential major spoilers ahead… 

The trailer starts with little Jean Grey arriving at the X-Mansion. After everything got a bit big and bloated in Apocalypse, the trailer seems to keen to remind us that this film is much more character driven – focusing on Jean’s traumatic downfall to become the person that finally breaks up the band. This is an X-Men movie, but it’s Jean’s story. 

More importantly, the music kicks in early on to remind us all what the stakes are. A cover version of The Doors’ song, famously used in Apocalypse Now, “This Is The End” seems like a fitting way to send the series off. 

James McAvoy is back (with hair, in the flashback), to tell Jean that she doesn’t have anything to worry about. She does though, because we know there’s something fairly dark inside Jean – even as a little girl – and Charles’ attempts to save her make up the emotional core of the film (and, arguably, of the whole series). 

“The mind is a fragile thing. It only takes the slightest tap to send it in the wrong direction,” says Professor X in a voiceover.  

Cut to the present day, and to Sophie Turner – returning to the role of Jean after we first saw her in X-Men: Apocalypse. Adult Jean is clearly still a big problem for the X-Men, who have her tied down to a table whilst they all mill about, looking concerned. We’ve already seen her use her Phoenix Force power to kill En Sabah Nur at the end of the last movie, but it seemed like she had no real control over it. By the look of things, the film will start off in the same place – following Jean as she learns to harness her power, and as she slides closer to the dark side in doing so. 

Central to the character is what happened to her as a child. We see the young Jean using her powers to steer her parent’s car off the road – presumably causing the event that sees her sent to the X-Mansion in the first place. There’s a bit of wrangling with the comic backstory going on here, but the outcome is still fairly similar. 

Onto the A-listers, the trailer lets us know that Jennifer Lawrence is back in the role of Mystique. Another hugely important character to the bigger arc of the (more recent) X-films, we’ve seen her swap sides a few times already. When we last saw her, she was teaching the kids at the Mansion, but we know that this film has plenty in store for her…

A series newbie, Jessica Chastain makes an entrance that reveals pretty much nothing about the mysterious villain we all know she’s playing. We know she’s a bad guy, we know she’s the one who lures Jean away from the X-Men, and we think we know that she’s a Skrull – but it’s hard to tell at this point. If she is a shapeshifting Skrull, her presence in the film asks all kinds of questions about the Fox/Marvel crossover world that we’re still in (for this one last film, at least).

We see her stalking around the aftermath of a few big set-pieces in the trailer, occasionally with a henchman in tow, but we’ll have to wait for more footage to find out exactly who she is. 

Tye Sheridan is back as Cyclops, which is obviously a good thing. We first saw him in X-Men: Apocalypse, which gave him a bit of a backstory with Jean already, so it’s likely that he’s going to have plenty to do here when the going gets rough. Emotions are clearly running high in this sequel, and there’s a good chance that Cyclops isn’t going to react too well to Jean going all evil. 

The trailer also gives us a look at slightly older versions of Evan Peters’ Quicksilver, Alexandra Shipp’s Storm and Nicholas Hoult’s Hank/Beast – who is also in line for some tough emotional scenes if what we all know is going to happen is still actually going to happen (more on that in a tick). We see him here mostly glowering and looking angry, suggesting that his own morality is going to come into question during the film. 

We also get a good look at the costumes. The X-Men gather for a set-piece that looks a lot like it takes place near Jean’s New York home (the one she clearly blows up a few seconds later), and Cyclops, Quicksilver, Nightcrawler, Beast, Professor X, Storm and Mystique are all sporting their natty new ’90s era costumes – somewhere between the designs they’ve been tinkering with since First Class and the outfits we know from the more recent comic runs.

The same set-piece clearly sees Jean blowing a lot of stuff up, including her own house and a couple of police cars. We also see her pulling down a helicopter (possibly on Magneto’s mutant paradise island of Genosha) and taking on the army in the middle of the X-Mansion. With her powers getting stronger, we’re obviously going to see a lot of destruction following her – although most of the grounded, practical looking action scenes we see in the trailer make a nice change from some of the bigger, flashier CG fests of recent chapters. 

That said, we are going to space… We see a few short shots of the X-Men flying off to rescue a space shuttle in what starts off as a routine rescue mission before going horribly wrong. The synopsis describes an incident that awakens Jean’s powers (via cosmic rays) which sounds like a simplification of what happens in the comics when the Phoenix Force finds Jean for the first time. Either way, it’s nice to finally see the X-Men leaving Earth, which they seem to do all of the time in print. 

As much as this is Jean’s story, and as much as Chastain is being bigged-up as the baddie, the other main storyline that needs resolving here is Erik’s. “You’re always sorry, Charles. And there’s always a speech… and nobody cares,” he snarls, turning his back on his friend again. Clearly, Erik blames Charles for creating Jean, and he’s not happy when her path of destruction lands on his nice new island. 

Which means, of course, that Magneto is back for good. Symbolically getting his old helmet out of the loft, Erik puts it on again with a lot of fanfare – suggesting that the events of Dark Phoenix mark the culmination of his early character arc – going from bad to good to bad to sort of good to really bad again. The whole reason he wears the helmet is to block Charles from getting inside his head, so it’s clear that the rift between them is bad enough for Erik to want to shut out his best friend for good.  

The next two shots are pretty revealing – first giving us a first glimpse of the new brotherhood of mutants. Magneto is in charge, but Beast is standing beside him, having swapped sides against Charles. Next to them stands two new additions, Red Lotus (Andrew Stehlin) and Selene (Kota Eberhardt). 

Selene is a pretty big deal in the comics (an ancient vampiric mutant who can drain the life-force out of any living being, eventually becoming the Black Queen), but Red Lotus is a bit of Z-lister, which probably means he’s canon fodder. Selene might make a good character to continue the series though, so it’ll be interesting to see if she survives. 

Crucially though, the reverse shot of the same scene only shows four members of the X-Men. Is this all that’s left? We think we know where Mystique is by this point in the film, but what about Quicksilver? With pretty slim pickings on both sides, it looks like Jean’s powers might end up being even more devastating than we thought…

Onto the big spoiler that everyone sort of already knows about… It’s been teased for a while now, but the fact that we see a shot of Beast, Professor X, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Storm all standing around a soggy grave seems to confirm that Mystique won’t be making it out of Dark Phoenix alive. 

And if you needed any more proof, the next shot shows Hank/Beast kissing her goodbye. His sadness, which turns to rage, is surely the thing that causes him to switch sides, and his emotional baggage is added to the pile that everyone else is stacking up here. 

The most revealing thing here is Fox’s decision to not save this scene for the film itself – as the impact of Mystique’s death is surely going to be lessened now that the whole world has already seen it in the teaser. Does this mean that her death isn’t the big shock we’ve all been waiting for? Now that Fox know they’re done with the series, did they decide to kill off a few other X-Men too? 

Back to the main story, the trailer culminates in Jean’s explosive meeting with the Phoenix Force – the bird-like super power that eventually fills her up with evil.  

“I’ve seen evil,” says Magneto, “I’m looking at it now”. The trailer ends as the Phoenix starts to leach out of Jean’s face, making her eyes glow with power. 

However Dark Phoenix ends, it’s going to be explosive, it’s going to be emotional, and it’s going to change the X-Men films forever.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix opens on February 5th.