With a 114-minute running time and questionable buzz in advance of its release, you might be wondering whether you’ll have time to go relieve yourself of that $14 soda while sitting through Dark Phoenix. That’s why we’ve gathered the 48 best moments to go to the bathroom during the movie without missing anything important.
- The opening credits are like the Marvel Studios ones but with all 1000 or whatever X-Men who have appeared in these movies. Feel free to show up late.
- Professor X begins five separate monologues with “the mind is a powerful thing, but a terrible burden…” You can duck out during any one of these.
- When Quicksilver tries to bang a chick in all 50 states before a coin stops spinning.
- Whenever Magneto and/or Professor X give an unsolicited Philosophy 101 lecture.
- Whenever someone plays a chess game that’s a laborious analogy.
- The Stan Lee cameo in this is that every civilian corpse is Stan Lee. Just a bunch of Stan Lees in a pile.
- To establish that it’s 1992, all the X-Men sit in a circle and listen to Automatic for the People front to back.
- When it looks like two characters who are the color blue are going to bond over being the color blue when everyone else is not the color blue.
- When the characters stop to look at a really on-the-nose museum exhibit about human evolution and then hi-five.
- The scene where a young Rogue absorbs Magneto’s ability to grimly say things like “no, Charles. Not this time,” and “maybe once, Charles, but now? No.”
- They feel the need to do a fucking Deadpool thing.
- Iceman’s date with Psylocke is obviously a huge waste of time.
- Professor X explains the chronology of the X-Men films to a kid at the X-Mansion and the kid doesn’t really get it the first time.
- When Mystique dies you can skip the 90% of that scene because they showed it in the trailer.
- When Beast tries to show off by hanging upside down while he calculates something but then all his pens fall out of his jacket and everyone needs to help him pick them all up.
- They had Joss Whedon come in to punch up the script with some riff sessions about how funny the idea of ‘brunch’ is.
- A heated discussion of what to do about Jean Grey ends with Magneto looking at a notebook on a stool and going “what else… what else…”
- Whenever Storm says to Nightcrawler, “only real 90s kids will…”
- The shots where Jean Grey is conflicted and looks from person to person and we can’t quite tell how she feels about them? Each of those shots are 140 seconds long.
- Three words: Dazzler. Sings. Nu metal.
- The movie spends so much time teeing up a Wolverine appearance that never comes so you can take a leisurely shit and not worry about it. Read the io9 article about it later.
- Just like when Nixon was a full-on supporting character in Days of Future Past, this movie has the X-Men chewing out Cyclops for voting for Ross Perot.
- Maggott is in the movie and it takes a while to explain what his whole deal is.
- A few scenes happen twice because they shot them with Ansel Elgort instead of Tye Sheridan by accident at first.
- When the Hellfire Club installs a pinball machine at the Hellfire Clubhouse.
- When Uatu the Watcher Watches Cyclops and Jean bone.
- When Professor X uses Cerebro “too hard” and it makes him freak out, which is the mutant equivalent of forgetting you can’t plug a surge protector into an extension cord, and just as shortsighted.
- Let’s just say the Magneto Holocaust flashbacks have gotten less and less sensitive and nuanced as time has gone on.
- They reintroduce William Stryker but keep painting him as a villain instead of a guy who is trying his best to regulate the godlike science wizards who attract the cosmic forces of death to Earth. I don’t get it.
- When they refuel the jet in real time to make some kind of point about oil or the Gulf War or whatever.
- The X-Men go to space in this one so you can skip all the parts where they get used to zero-gravity, which is somehow more disorienting than being a superhero.
- Sophie Turner, around minute 83, starts slipping into her Game of Thrones Sansa voice, seemingly as an audition for a sequel show she thinks HBO is working on.
- I don’t wanna be mean or anything, and I know it doesn’t really make me look good, which I accept. But honestly whenever Moira MacTaggart shows up
- The lengthy class-action lawsuit parents file against Professor X for grossly misrepresenting what kind of fucking crazy-ass battle school they sent their kids to.
- The subsequent scene in court where Professor X has to justify the purpose of a ‘Danger Room’ to the judge.
- Whenever the group collectively decides to give Magneto another chance, you can go to the bathroom for fifteen minutes and return just in time for that decision backfires.
- When Dark Phoenix devours that star, someone in the audience is gonna shout “I’ll have what she’s having.” You don’t need to be there for that.
- There a moment where a hush falls over the scene and everyone on set is clearly remembering “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch” all at the same time.
- I hate to be the one to tell you but at one point during your screening everyone is going to receive a New York Times update on their phones simultaneously, announcing that a beloved celebrity has passed away. It was expected, at their age, but devastating nonetheless. The theater will pause the film to give everyone the chance to go into the lobby and call their families to tell them they love them. Perfect opportunity to slide into the facilities. If you’re late getting back into your seat, don’t worry, because the next scene is a breakdance-off between Colossus and Lockheed.
- Try to anticipate the moment where they cram the title into the dialogue (it’s in there) and sprint out of the theater then, even if you don’t have to use the bathroom.
- The scene where the Brotherhood of Mutants takes a vote on scrapping the ‘Evil’ for obvious optical reasons.
- A sequence where Professor X advocates against rising property taxes in Westchester, which would affect at least two superhero bases, actually.
- That scene where the young, inexperienced mutant expresses trepidation about their role in the coming battle — despite having the ability to, like, split worlds in half with their mind — and needs to be reassured by someone whose power is they can see really far, or something.
- When they have to defend the choice of the yellow suits before every fight.
- The ending they refilmed to be less like Captain Marvel is unfortunately now exactly like the ending of Mystery Men.
- There’s a mid-credits scene that’s just a 20th Century Fox rep telling you The New Mutants has been pushed back to 2023.
- A post-credits scene teases appearances by Aurora and Northstar by showing two babies with name tags that say ‘Aurora’ and ‘Northstar.’
- Oh, and going back a bit, please skip the protracted conversation in the movie about how someone named “Blyan Stringer” isn’t that bad a guy.
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