Dark Phoenix, 20th century Fox’s final X-Men film is currently at a bad place. The film was plagued with many production issues and released to a record-low opening at the Box office. The film, after only 3 weeks since hitting theaters, has made only north of $200 million. While that number might sound high to some studios, for a superhero film of this magnitude to bomb so spectacularly is rarely seen these days.
Adding fuel to fire, Dark Phoenix will lose even more theaters going into its 4th week, having lost more than 1667 theaters. The film hasn’t fared any well critically either. It holds a lowly 23% on Rotten Tomatoes, while it does have a decent 64% audience score. The above graphic from Box Office Mojo paints the picture pretty clearly: The film is going to lose a LOT of money.
Doubts on the performance of the film were already being cast before the film even entered production, when Simon Kinberg was announced as Director. While Kinberg has been involved with the franchise very closely since its inception, giving the reigns of such a big production to a first-time director was always a bad idea. Kinberg also owned up to the failure of the movie, taking full responsibility for it. The film retells a story that was already (sort of) covered in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, another film which went on to become a flop.
This makes the film the worst performing installment in the franchise by a long shot. However, not everything is so grim about the situation. With the rights now under the ownership of Disney, and by extension Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige is sure to be working on a successful relaunch of the characters in live-action relatively soon.
Dark Phoenix is currently playing in (not so many) theaters.
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