After an estimated franchise low domestic opening of $33 million for Dark Phoenix, it sounds like things may get worse.
Deadline is suggesting that the final X-Men movie could end up losing $100-120 million after the overall costs (includes budget, distribution, and marketing costs) of the comic book film in the range of $350 million and the low box office will make things very difficult to edge-out a profit or break even.
Even though Dark Phoenix is the No. 1 winner around the globe with $140M –down substantially from the worldwide launches of X-Men: Days of Future Past ($262.9M), Logan ($247.4M) and X-Men: Apocalypse ($166.6M), finance experts tell us that the tale of Jean Grey will burn out with an estimated $100M-$120M loss after ancillaries, off a combined production and P&A estimated cost of $350M+ (which includes reshoots).
TheHollywoodReporter tried to analyze what went wrong this weekend and suggested that doubling-down on repeating the same mistakes of poorly received installments such as X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Apocalypse along with multiple release date changes could have led to audience disinterest. Another problem highlighted was the film had horrible awareness which might have a lot to do with the lackluster marketing and promo materials released to sell to the film.
I personally think that having a first-time director also being the film’s producer and screenwriter may have contributed to the hiccups as well. There likely weren’t as many fresh eyes and constructive criticism from others during the development phases on the project to pick-up on potentially repeating previous franchise mistakes. Along with reshooting a more fantastical sounding third act could have been a big factor as well.
Dark Phoenix isn’t really the final mutant movie from 20th Century Fox, as Josh Boone’s The New Mutants is set for release on April 3rd, 2020. Producer Simon Kinberg has confirmed that reshoots on that film will take place sometime this year and the extent of those reshoots have yet to be revealed.
It was revealed by TheHollywoodReporter that Dark Phoenix had a combined five weeks of reshoots (two principal photography and three with the 2nd unit), but it remains to be seen if they’ll attempt to reshoot an entire act of The New Mutants like with that movie.
There has been some fan speculation that Disney might want to remove any hint of the previous franchise in the reshoots and could attempt to incorporate the film into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Nothing really supports any of that at the moment but the former might be a good idea allowing New Mutants to be a standalone film feels like the best plan at the moment until we see how audiences react to it in April.
SOURCE: DEADLINE
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