2019’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix was supposed to be the movie that finally did justice to one of the comic’s most celebrated storylines, the Dark Phoenix Saga by Chris Claremont and John Byrne. It had already been done, to disastrous effect, in 2006’s X-Men 3: The Last Stand. Writer-director Simon Kinberg made his directorial debut with this, taking over for Bryan Singer, whose career imploded in the years following X-Men: Apocalypse. While there’s no doubt everyone went in with the right intentions, Dark Phoenix went down with a thud when it opened in the summer of 2019. The box office was disastrous, only grossing $65 million domestically, which is a nightmarish haul for a movie that cost at least $200 million.
Notably, the fan reaction was terrible, with many saying this take on the Dark Phoenix storyline was only marginally better than the one in The Last Stand. Initially set to kick off a new trilogy, that plan had already been scuttled by the time Dark Phoenix hit theatres. In the time since the movie was filmed and got released, Fox had been sold to Disney, meaning that if the X-Men returned, they would be part of the MCU. When this came out, everyone involved seemed to realize this was the last hurrah for this iconic version of the X-Men, but the reaction from fans was that this heavily re-shot and re-cut movie sent the franchise out with a whimper rather than a bang. So what went wrong? Plenty, as you’ll find out in WTF Happened to X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which is written by Gaius Bolling, edited by Cesar Gabriel, and narrated by Mathew Plale. Is X-Men: Dark Phoenix as bad as they say? Let us know in the comments!
