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Dark Phoenix, the latest installment in the X-Men series, has collapsed at the box office.
Following reshoots, the Sophie Turner-led film – co-starring Jessica Chastain, Jennifer Lawrence, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender – cost a reported $200 million to produce, not including marketing costs.
Dark Phoenix opened on Friday (7 June) to $14 million in the United States. According to Forbes, the film could take around $32 million across the entire weekend, which would be the worst opening for any X-Men film.
The current worst opening is The Wolverine, which took $53 million in 2013, closely followed by X-Men: First Class, at $55 million in 2011. The film more closely matches Fantastic Four. Directed by Josh Trank, the superhero team-up was a flop, opening to $25.7 million.
Reviews for Dark Phoenix have been widely negative, scoring just 22 percent on aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s Cinemascore was also a franchise low at B minus.
A critic wrote of Dark Phoenix: “The latest X-Men film risks short-circuiting thanks to its own overabundance of special effects.
“The many scenes of characters being consumed by fireballs or crumbling to dust or being hurled backward by the lightning-like force in the X-Men’s fingertips become increasingly dreary.
“This is a young adult drama as much as it is a sci-fi film but doesn’t have anything very fresh to say about the trauma of adolescence as experienced by mutant superheroes.”
