Early box office tracking for Dark Phoenix has arrived, and things aren't looking great for 20th Century Fox's final X-Men movie's opening weekend numbers.
According to estimates, the Simon Kinberg-directed mutant adventure is tracking in the $50 million range. If the movie does make less than the $53M The Wolverine took in back in 2013, it will officially have the lowest domestic opening weekend of any film in the X-Men franchise.
Of course, these are just estimates. There's a good chance Dark Phoenix's tracking will go up once Fox/Disney makes a final marketing push, but the studio should probably still prepare for a disappointing bow on June 7.
You might assume this is due to Marvel Studios regaining the rights to the characters, but the average cinema-goer wouldn't be aware of that sort of thing, so it seems even the hardcore X-Men fans lost interest after Apocalypse and the mediocre trailers.
At this point, let's just hope that the movie surprises us, because it'd be shame for this once great franchise (okay, so it wasn't consistently great) to go out on a whimper.
About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.