X-Men: ‘Dark Phoenix’ Reshoots Rumored to Have Driven Film’s Budget to $200 Million

Dark Phoenix‘s production budget is rumored to have skyrocketed thanks to lengthy reshoots on the X-Men film.

According to Observer, Dark Phoenix‘s reshoots brought the film’s budget up to $200 million. To put that into perspective, X-Men: Apocalypse cost $178 million to make. Marvel’s first Avengers movie had a budget of $220 million while all of its sequels have cost more than $300 million. But where the Avengers films have all been billion-dollar box office performers, X-Men: Apocalypse only made about half as much.

In a recent interview, director Simon Kinberg brushed off concerns over Dark Phoenix being rescheduled multiple times following reshoots.

“Movies get pushed all the time,” Kinberg says. “I remember JJ [Abrams] pushed Star Trek a year, then he pushed Star Wars a year, and those movies turned out great, and our movie’s turned out great as well. We really wanted to wait until the visual effects…the biggest challenge of this movie in terms of time is visual effects. There’s a lot of visual effects in this movie. They’re really intricate, more intricate than we’ve ever had in these films, partly because it goes into outer space and that’s hard to render. And the movie will be done in actually just a couple of months and you look at the calendar and you start to see competitively where the best place for it to be released would be, the best time, and the studio felt like it warranted a big summer blockbuster release because it became, despite its intimacy, a very big-scale film. So we started looking at summer and that was the perfect date for it in the summer.”

While most fans see Dark Phoenix as the swan song for Fox’s X-Men movies franchise – a theory backed up by reports that all of Fox’s future Marvel projects have been canceled – Kinberg describes Dark Phoenix as the beginning of a new chapter for the franchise.

“I see it as a new chapter,” Kinberg says. “I see it as taking the franchise in a different direction tonally. And that doesn’t mean that the next one will have the same tone, it just means that the next one can have a different tone. I think for many years, the X-Men, Bryan [Singer] really transformed the superhero genre in 2000 or 2001 when the first one came out. That’s almost 20 years ago. It is a long time ago. And at that time, superhero movies were not wildly popular, actually. There had been a few failures in the mid-90s, and there hadn’t been a lot of superhero movies, if any, around that time and X-Men sort of was revolutionary in its moment.”

Dark Phoenix opens in theaters on June 7th.

Upcoming X-Men movies include The New Mutants on August 2, 2019, and Gambit on March 13, 2020.