20th Century Fox has really been struggling with their super hero franchises. For a long time the company held the rights to popular comic book properties like Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Deadpool before Disney purchased most of Fox. And it seems like Deadpool is the only franchise that Fox can successfully handle because, according to Cinema Blend, the latest X-Men movie Dark Phoenix bombed hard critically and and financially.
In fact, the most recent Fantastic Four movie, annoyingly titled Fan4stic, did better at the box office than Dark Phoenix last month. Forbes reveals the exact earnings of Dark Phoenix and other movies that were released around the same time.
As the title suggests Dark Phoenix is a retelling of the famous Dark Phoenix Saga from the original X-Men comics. This was not the first time that the saga was adapted for film, with X-Men: The Last Stand incorporating elements of the original storyline into its narrative. The saga has also been adapted for television in the 1990’s Fox Kids X-Men cartoon, as well as Wolverine and the X-Men.
Though the movie was plagued by a delayed release date, several reshoots, and the Disney-Fox merger happening during production, the writer and director of Dark Phoenix, Simon Kinberg, has taken responsibility for the movie’s failure. Kinberg was also a writer of X-Men: The Last Stand, which didn’t do well critically either. Perhaps this is a sign that adapting an enormous comic book sagas into a single movie is not a good idea.
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