Director Simon Kinberg takes responsibility for X-Men Dark Phoenix’s failure

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He also talked about the difficulties the film faced regarding its release. “I always felt that we had a tough date for this particular movie. It wasn’t made as a classic superhero movie, it was made as more of a dramatic, intimate, smaller film,” he said, adding, “Originally it was going to come out in November, then it was going to come out in February, and those were the date that I felt like it actually would have felt more appropriate to.”

Kinberg also indirectly pointed fingers at the impending merger between Disney and Fox and implied that it may have affected the film’s production.

“Well, there’s no question that people were either getting fired or leaving. I think the massive layoffs, people were well aware of, and ultimately in the last six months or so, there were massive layoffs. Like thousands and thousands of people. So the marketing and publicity side of Fox were very badly hit, and I noticed it because oblivious I was going to marketing meetings every week and there were people who weren’t there anymore. They were people that I worked with for many years on many movies that I made,” he said.

Another record the filmmakers would rather the film had not made is its Rotten Tomatoes score. The critics did not like the film at all. It holds the lowest rating for any X-Men movie. Its score is 23 per cent. The consensus reads, “Dark Phoenix ends an era of the X-Men franchise by taking a second stab at adapting a classic comics arc — with deeply disappointing results.”