If you were still holding out hope that Tim Miller‘s Kitty Pryde movie, code-named 143, would see the light of day, I have some bad news. It looks like the project is officially dead, according to Miller himself. This isn’t entirely surprising, as the movie was announced well before the big Disney-Fox merger threw things out of whack, coupled with the box office disappointment of Dark Phoenix.

Last year, word broke that Deadpool director Tim Miller was developing a Kitty Pryde movie with writer Brian Michael Bendis. The project was going by the working-title 143, a reference to Uncanny X-Men No. 143, one of the first solo Kitty Pryde stories, in which the character goes head to head against a demon inside the X-Mansion. Earlier this year, the project was revealed to still be in the works, with Bendis offering an update stating he was hard at work on the script.

But now it appears that the Kitty Pryde film is dead. Speaking with Comicbook, Miller said: “I don’t expect Marvel to call me and say, ‘Come do the X-Men,’ so I’m not waiting for that. I was really excited about my Kitty Pryde movie. Fuck, I love that movie. It’ll never happen now.”

While Miller doesn’t go into detail as to why the movie will “never happen now,” it likely has something to do with the big Disney-Fox merger. The X-Men were previously the property of Fox, but the merger changed all that. Now, the fate of all-things X-Men related is up in the air. Dark Phoenix was the last film from the Fox era to see the light of day, and it underperformed at the box office, become the lowest-grossing installment in the series.

Then there’s the curious case of New Mutants. That X-Men-related film was set to open in April 2018, but then got pushed to February 2019. It was then pushed yet again to August 2019 – and then shuffled around one more time, landing on an April 2020 release date. Whether or not that actually happens is still up in the air. There’s always a chance Disney could dump it onto their streaming service Disney+. Or they could just push it back even further.

In any case, it’s clear that X-Men-related properties still have to be sorted out now that the Disney-Fox deal is over, and the Kitty Pryde movie is likely an unfortunate casualty of all that. That’s not to say we won’t get a Kitty Pryde movie someday in the future, but whatever it was that Miller and Bendis were cooking up is now kaput.

The post That ‘Kitty Pryde’ Movie From Director Tim Miller is Dead appeared first on /Film.