By now, I’m sure you’re well aware of how X-Men: Dark Phoenix was an unfortunate box office bomb. Though I’m certain being panned by critics didn’t help matters, the delays and reshoots undoubtedly didn’t instill consumer confidence. Hey, when something has nearly a year of negative press preceding it, failure is virtually inevitable.
Personally, I didn’t hate the flick and thought it was fine for the first hour or so, but it was pretty easy to tell that the third act had been reshot. As an individual product, it wasn’t entirely bad. But as a finale, Dark Phoenix simply didn’t work as a conclusion to a nineteen-year-old film franchise with its obviously rushed ending.
Similar to how Joel Schumacher accepted the blame for Batman & Robin not meeting expectations, Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg did likewise recently while speaking with KCRW’s Kim Masters:
“It clearly is a movie that didn’t connect with audiences that didn’t see it, it didn’t connect enough with audiences that did see it. So that’s on me. I loved making the movie, and I loved the people I made the movie with.”
To be completely honest, I don’t think all the blame is on Kinberg because this movie likely got caught up in the middle of Disney’s acquisition of Fox. Odds are the Mouse House didn’t want one film stepping on the toes of a character they’d already placed a lot of chips on, hence the aforementioned reshoots.
At the time of this writing, Dark Phoenix sits at 23% on Rotten Tomatoes and has amassed $146,505,971 worldwide. Those numbers aren’t entirely ugly, though the foreign market is more so taking the bait. The mutants’ latest adventure posted the franchise’s weakest debut in the United States this past weekend, so here’s hoping the eventual reboot can help them reattain their former glory.