"X-Men: Dark Phoenix" suffered heavy losses, and even the Chinese market couldn't save it

According to foreign media The Playlist, 20th Century Fox's X-Men series finale "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" will be a box office Waterloo even more tragic than 2015's "Fantastic Four".

After last weekend, "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" has been released worldwide for a full month. Its current global box office total is 249 million US dollars, including 64.6 million US dollars in North America. It is expected to end with a box office of barely over 250 million US dollars.

China is the largest overseas box office for the film, contributing 407 million RMB (about 59 million USD) as of today. This seems to be a very good result, but the film cost more than 200 million USD. If calculated based on the total box office of 250 million USD, the total box office of "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" is only 1.25 times of the production cost.

What does a box office/cost ratio of 1.25 mean? Even the 2015 version of "Fantastic Four", which is generally recognized as a "super bad movie" in the superhero genre, had a box office of 1.39 times its cost, with an investment of $120 million in exchange for a global box office of $167 million. This is undoubtedly an extremely embarrassing result for Fox and the X-Men series. What's more, "Fantastic Four" has never been released in China.

In terms of word of mouth, the performance of "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" is not satisfactory, with IMDB score of 6.1 and Douban score of 6.0, both of which are the lowest in the history of the series. The Playlist pointed out that in the ranking of the largest superhero movies in the United States, "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" ranked 84th, and the closest to it were "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army" and "Blade" in 1998.

Of course, the copyright of the X-Men series has now returned to Marvel Studios and Disney, and its future performance is still unknown. However, "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" has damaged the brand value of this evergreen IP. It is regrettable that the Fox X-Men series, which spanned 20 years, ended in this way.