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A dark, somber meeting room with a long table surrounded by men in suits. A projector casts a beam onto a screen displaying a declining 'BOX OFFICE' graph and a 'DARK PHOENIX' movie poster.

A dark, somber meeting room with a long table surrounded by men in suits. A projector casts a beam onto a screen displaying a declining 'BOX OFFICE' graph and a 'DARK PHOENIX' movie poster.

This was Fox’s second attempt to adapt the famous Dark Phoenix Saga from the comics, after it was previously attempted in X-Men: The Last Stand to weak results. But while The Last Stand was still financially successful despite its tepid reception, Dark Phoenix hit an absolute franchise low in terms of both critical reception and opening weekend grosses, and a final domestic and global total beneath the original X-Men film — $296 million worldwide, in 2000 dollars — which makes it the lowest-grossing installment of the main series, and the second lowest-grossing film including spin-offs (it only grossed higher than The New Mutants). According to Deadline Hollywood, the reasons for its financial failure included an inflated budget due to extensive reshoots, lack of interest in the prequels after the mixed reception of X-Men: Apocalypse (along with some audiences seeing either X-Men: Days of Future Past or Logan as a proper ending for the film series), low promotion and the marketing campaign being muddled (a result of lay-offs related to the Disney-Fox merger), and the release date being in June, amid huge competition. The film needed to make about $500 million to be considered profitable, and was expected to lose Fox $100 million to $120 million by the time of the final total.* Advertisement: Tired of seeing ads? Subscribe! (Later reports suggested that the total loss was $133 million, making it the biggest flop of 2019.) In another, rather depressing analysis, the movie Mehr sehen