Filmmaker Simon Kinberg says X-Men: The Last Stand could have given a more wholesome treatment to the story of telepathic and telekinetic mutant, Jean Grey/Dark Phoenix. Kinberg, who served as the writer for the 2006 film, said they were unable to go "cosmic" with the subplot.

"I really felt that one of the mistakes we made with 'X-Men 3', which told, in a way, the Dark Phoenix story but it was the subplot of that film, one of the mistakes we made was that we didn't go cosmic with it, like the comics," the director told DigitalSpy on the sidelines of WonderCon. Famke Janssen has starred as Jean Grey in four "X-Men" films and Sophie Turner took over the role in 2016's X-Men: Apocalypse as the mutant's younger version.