IGN: Do you feel like now because this genre has evolved and so many bigger and crazier comic-book stories have been told on the screen, when approaching Dark Phoenix you can be a little more true to the source material? In the original comic, for example, they go into space and it's much more cosmic and epic in a way. Is that kind of the general idea here with this film?
Hutch Parker: Well, you know, I don't want to go into anything specific, but certainly just as a philosophical matter I don't think there's any territory that's out of bounds. I think part of what these have done is -- and I think there's more to come -- the expanding of the genre paradigms for comic book movies. And we're just at the beginning, and I sort of half-jokingly say you could easily do a romantic comedy. You could do that because at their core you’re talking about characters, whatever their challenges interpersonally, emotionally, or psychologically, who happen to have powers. And so when you really embrace that and you commit yourself to try to depict it in as substantive a way as you can, whether that's a tone like Deadpool or a tone like Guardians or even like Logan's, you begin to see that there's a really broad horizon and that includes where do the storylines go, how intimate can it be or how expansive can it be? And I think you do have to attend to the sort of core values of film, which is that the audience wants to have a relationship with the characters, they want to understand what's going on there. There are certain things that comics can have a little bit more freedom in then when you're asking an audience to engage in it as a piece of cinema, but I do feel like the canvas is much bigger and wider and that we're being invited and frankly challenged to take risks, to be a little bit different. And that's fun, that's exciting.
IGN: So what is the plan for the main X-Men franchise now? I know you have the Dark Phoenix movie going, but it feels as though the cast is locked into period films in a way. That seems like it could potentially be a franchise problem in that they don't exist in the same time as Deadpool or even I guess The New Mutants. Is the plan to continue to set those sort of core X-Men in the past?
HP: I think as you've identified Dark Phoenix is kind of following on what we've done in First Class and Apocalypse and Days of Future Past, but we’re moving pretty fast towards the present and I think it will open up the possibility of expanding the world to kind of include or at least touch on some of these other arenas, you know kind of other characters, other times, and things like that. We also know within the world now we have experienced time travel, we have experienced so many different tools and techniques for moving fluidly wherever one wants to. And I think the key for us in all the conversations with [Dark Phoenix writer-director] Simon [Kinberg] and the various filmmakers is really letting the stories we feel are best told to kind of dictate where we go. When we find a story we really believe is one that should be told, how do we best tell it and you know what do we need to tell that story most effectively? I think to the good, the universe is such that there are a lot of options, there a lot of opportunities. So that's kind of what's guiding us. It’s a long-winded way of saying I think we have flexibility and I think you may see some of that intersection in the future.
IGN: Is it scary to now be embarking on an X-Men movie with Dark Phoenix that will not have Hugh Jackman in it, and presumably not have Wolverine in it?
HP: No, because honestly I've never believed that... I mean, we’re lucky in that we have a lot of iconic characters, but I really think the key to any movie is that you tell the story kind of in a fulsome way, with depth, with skill, and you will find your audience. So the idea of having Hugh in it, I'd love to have him in it if there were a meaningful role for him to play. I think one of the mistakes that people historically have made in Hollywood, and there are countless examples of this, is making the assumption that if the movie worked before, if we just remake it it'll work again. And that's the same mistake as if we just put this big element into the middle of a movie that'll mean it works. And that's a false assumption. Would I like to have Hugh? Always. He's one of the finest guys around and is such a pleasure and so iconic in that character. But I think in the Dark Phoenix story that we're preparing, we feel really good about it and it's an opportunity to do something also that is unique and different and more specific in ways that previous movies haven’t really had the opportunity to be and that what those things are will fulfill what we're trying to do. So you never know whether they're going to work. We didn't know on Logan. But we feel very good about the story we're telling in the movie we hope to make and we hope the audience will too.
IGN: Now, you've been involved in these films from the beginning, haven't you?
HP: Yeah, in one role or another, meaning for the last four or five years I've been producing and before that I was at the studio for something like 20 years.
IGN: So what's it like to see how far this genre has come in the past 15 or 20 years? Really, you know, the trend kind of started with the X-Men movies and Spider-Man over at Sony.
HP: It's pretty amazing, and we owe a debt of gratitude to Bryan Singer and Lauren Shuler Donner for what they did with those early movies and the door they kicked open with the tone of the first X-Men. [It was] incredibly bold to open with something as sacred as, you know, the concentration camps, and in my opinion it reset the tonal boundaries for these movies and invited a different level of seriousness to them than we had seen before that. And I think they’ve continue to evolve since, and so for me sometimes more intimately and sometimes a little bit more sort of removed, it's been incredibly exciting to watch that evolve, knowing how incredibly rich and fruitful the underlying material is. At the end of the day, it's all about the underlying material and part of it has to be credited to that, and then I think you have the audience to credit because they have a lot to do with how they cast their votes. Ultimately as much as it's a business, it's a democracy. And the audience votes on how they feel based on the way they spend their money for tickets. So I think they play an important role.
And then I would I would tip my hat to the filmmakers because, as all of us know, it has so much to do with the filmmaker, and the quality of the material has gone on to attract really remarkable storytellers. And it will continue to because I think the horizon is broad and wide in terms of where these films can go tonally with these kinds of stories. We've now seen that with the ratings and in all ways the canvas is getting wider and larger, which doesn't necessarily mean we now all go make bigger movies. It actually means in some ways the opposite: You've got the flexibility to do them big when the scale is required or to do something more intimate when that's the better approach. And I find that really exhilarating as somebody who's involved in helping to articulate the stories and see them brought to the screen. You've got a tremendous amount of flexibility now.
IGN: It is such a vast world to pull from in the comics that there's got to be no shortage of material to spread around among all the filmmakers working on X-Men universe films, right?
HP: Yeah, that's absolutely true. In many ways there's more work than any few of us can do. And so luckily we've got other really high quality personnel and people, producers and directors and key personnel, that are drawn to the world. And that's great all the way around. It's great for these movies, it's great for emerging filmmakers, it's great for established filmmakers who want to kind of explore new territory. It's a really exciting place to be working.
