Simon Kinberg bit off way more than he could chew when he decided to make his directorial debut on Dark Phoenix, which drew some of the worst reviews the X-Men franchise had ever seen and ended up flopping at the box office to send Charles Xavier’s team of mutants out with a whimper rather than a bang.
The writer and producer was no stranger to the series, having been credited in some capacity on The Last Stand, First Class, Days of Future Past, Apocalypse, the Deadpool duology and Logan before that, but he clearly struggled with the pressures of tackling a $200 million blockbuster as a first-time filmmaker.
In a new interview with ScreenRant, Kinberg revealed that he had no idea Evan Peters had played an alternate version of Quicksilver in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s WandaVision, and he ended up finding out from his kids.
No, I did not know it was going to happen in advance actually, which was wild. And I did see it in real time. In fact, I didn’t even see it in real time. I was late to it by a day or two, but obviously, I have Twitter and I also have two sons who were hardcore X-Men and Marvel fans, and they saw it and they immediately texted me and they were like, ‘Dad, did you see?’. And I was like, ‘No, I haven’t seen the ep, thanks for spoiling it’. And then I saw it blowing up Twitter and then I was like, okay, well, immediately, obviously you have to go and watch it.
Not that Marvel is under any obligation to keep him in the loop since purchasing Fox and ending his association with the property, but you’d have thought a well-connected industry professional like Kinberg that had spent fifteen years playing in the X-Men sandbox would have heard from somebody other than his children long before the day Peters’ WandaVision debut aired.
