'X-Men: Dark Phoenix' to bomb even worse than 'Fantastic Four'

The news just keeps getting worse for the latest X-Men movie Dark Phoenix.

Not only has it bombed catastrophically, it looks like it's going to bomb more profoundly than the disastrous Fantastic Four movie did in 2015.

Read more: Dark Phoenix is getting panned

According to Forbes, it's like to top out at cinemas having made only $250 million worldwide, a pretty appalling box office take from its $200 million budget.

This sadly compares unfavourably to the reboot of Fantastic Four, which starred Miles Teller, Jamie Bell, Kate Mara and Michael B. Jordan.

That movie, helmed by Josh Trank, made $168 million from its $120 million budget, and that's without factoring in both films' marketing budgets, often the same amount again as a movie's production budget.

It equates to Dark Phoenix earning 1.25x its budget, compared to Fantastic Four’s 1.25x its budget.

Last month, Deadline reported that the movie, the last in the current iteration of the X-Men series and the film with the worst gross of any of its predecessors, could end up losing Fox $100 million in all.

But that was when predictions for the final total were more in the region of $300 million, surely now an insurmountable figure as it exits cinemas worldwide.

The movie was directed by Simon Kinberg, the producer and screenwriter who had penned X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, but had never helmed his own movie before.

Read more: X-Men’s future would have been radically different under Fox

Reshoots were needed, and then the film's release was pushed back from the original March 2018 date eventually to June 2019.

Then when it finally emerged, critics panned it, The Playlist mocking its 'atrocious, expository dialogue, cumbersome plot, whiplashing character motivations [and] unintentionally funny moments'.

Following the acquisition of Fox by Disney, the franchise will likely be rebooted, but for the time being, this last X-Men chapter will be one that is most lamented.