By The first trailer for X-Men: Dark Phoenix is here, and already a lot of fans are mourning the possible ending of the franchise while also staring into space and wondering exactly how old Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy's characters are meant to be at this point in the wibbly-wobbly X-timeline.
Game of Thrones' Sophie Turner is back as the young, powerful but uncontrolled mutant Jean Grey, who's working through the grief of losing her parents in a car crash and rebelling against the X-Men (McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult and pals) who are attempting to bring her into the fold and prevent her defecting to Fassbender's Magneto. (Confused? Us too).
The Phoenix of the title - a super-powerful entity within Jean Grey and an iconic villain of the comic books - turned up in X2 and the Vinnie Jones-assisted X-Men: The Last Stand, though in that one she was more of an evil alter ego than the "mysterious cosmic force" which the official X-Men bumph suggests she'll be this time.
There's been so much hopping of timelines in the 10 X-Men and X-Men-adjacent films - or 12, if we're counting Deadpool and Deadpool 2 - trying to work out how old anyone's meant to be is a bit of a minefield.
In X-Men: Days of Future Past - the one with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart stuck in the now and Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy back in 1973 - you'd assume the young Magneto and Xavier are somewhere in their mid-30s. As Dark Phoenix is set in 1992, they'd then be somewhere in their very suspiciously youthful mid-50s for this one, looking roughly as they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis in X-Men: First Class.
Then again, the young Magneto was 12 when he entered Auschwitz at the start of the first X-Men, so he'd be into his 60s by the time of Dark Phoenix. If the original X-Men took place in 2000 then Fassbender's Magneto must have had an extremely stressful rest of the 90s to turn into Ian McKellen over the next eight years.
Dark Phoenix was originally set for release this November, but reshoots for the final act have pushed the UK release back to 5 February next year.
