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A conference room table covered in movie scripts, concept art, and storyboards, with a whiteboard timeline on the wall behind.

A conference room table covered in movie scripts, concept art, and storyboards, with a whiteboard timeline on the wall behind.

X-Men: Apocalypse basically killed the prequel series. Its sequel, Dark Phoenix, was supposed to be the beginning of a Dark Phoenix Saga trilogy, and The New Mutants was originally supposed to be set in the 80s. Both films would have featured the return of the Hellfire Club, last seen in X-Men: First Class, as overarching villains, and the final film in the Dark Phoenix Saga trilogy would have been an adaptation of the Inferno storyline and feature the New Mutants. All of this came to an end when Fox got a new studio head (Stacey Snider) when Dark Phoenix was in pre-production. Stacey Snider didn't want to make any more prequel films due to Apocalypse's reception. As a result, The New Mutants was changed to be set in the present day, while the Hellfire Club were replaced by the D'Bari, a race of aliens that Jean destroyed the planet of in the comics, reimagined as Skrull Expies who served as the villains of Dark Phoenix. Subsequently, Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants were the last X-Men films produced by 20th Century Fox to be released following its purchase by Disney, all other films with X-Men characters since then (including Deadpool & Wolverine, a third Deadpool film that focused heavily on Fox-adapted characters) would be produced under Disney. In addition, whenever those films featured multiversal variants of X-Men played by their Fox actors, none of the prequel actors were invited back, with only the actors who played the present day versions of characters (such as Mehr sehen