Dark Phoenix Director Simon Kinberg Accepts Blame for Commercial Failure

If you’ve been online the past week, you’ll know by now that Dark Phoenix isn’t doing too well, both critically and commercially. As of this writing, the film is “Rotten” with a 23 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s come in under virtually all box office expectations, grossing just $146 million worldwide through Thursday night.

In a rare shattering of silence in a situation such as this, Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg has stepped forward publicly, taking the blame for the film’s poor performance with reviews and audiences alike.

“It clearly is a movie that didn’t connect with audiences that didn’t see it, it didn’t connect enough with audiences that did see it. So that’s on me,” Kinberg told KCRW’s Kim Masters. “I loved making the movie, and I loved the people I made the movie with.”

Later on in the interview, Kinberg admits that a previous chat with Ridley Scott has eased his mind about the entire process. While the two were on the set of The Martian, Scott told Kinberg his favorite film to work on was GI Jane, because that’s where he had the most fun.

“He said it was his favorite because it was just a great process and he learned a lot on the process of making it. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, and I thought about it a whole lot over the last weekend,” Kinberg reflected.

In the leadup to film, Kinberg told ComicBook.com that Dark Phoenix was his version of Avengers: Endgame or Game of Thrones Season Eight — it was meant to be an epic conclusion to years worth of storytelling.

“I approach this movie as the culmination of 20 years of storytelling, of living with the X-Men for all this time and watching this family come together, and this movie is the movie that challenged that family and tears them apart in a new way,” Kinberg said. “And so I imagined it as the culmination, and I even pitched it to the studio, as this is the culmination of this cycle of X-Men stories. Which there will be more X-Men movies in the future no doubt, but this particular cycle with this cast, it felt like it was time to do kind of what Game of Thrones has done, what Endgame has done, really see them challenged in a new way and sort of survive and go off into the sunset.”

What’d you think of the latest X-Men film? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Dark Phoenix is now in theaters. Other upcoming Marvel-based films include Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 2nd while New Mutants is scheduled for release on August 2nd.