https://icv2.com/articles/columns/view/43373/pets-2-tops-box-office-dark-phoenix-flops
"The box office prospects for Dark Phoenix look even bleaker. It is the first X-Men film ever to open her in North America below the $50 million mark, and Dark Phoenix’s $33 million bow is so far from $50 million that it appears that it will also be the first X-Men film to fail to earn at least $100 million in the domestic market.
It has been quite some time since a major comic book-inspired film has flopped so miserably, so it is important to look at some of the reasons for this box office disaster. Right off the bat, the fact that Fox changed Dark Phoenix’s release date twice is a very bad sign that the studio knew they had a problem on their hands. While reshoots can sometimes help salvage a foundering film, they often fail to do so while driving up the cost (Dark Phoenix reportedly cost $200 million to produce and will almost certainly end up well in the red).
Reviews don’t always play a huge role in how genre films play at the box office, but Dark Phoenix had the worst notices in franchise history (just 23% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), and the fact that the previous X- Men film in the franchise, X-Men: Apocalypse, which opened with $65.5 million in 2016, also received bad notices and bad word-of-mouth certainly didn’t help. Word-of-mouth for Dark Phoenix isn’t going to help either—opening weekend audiences, which skewed male (57%) and older (61% over 25), gave the film a lousy “B-“ CinemaScore.
Comic book fans are also aware that Dark Phoenix would be the last of the Fox-produced X-Men films. With Disney buying Fox, the rights to the X-Men characters will revert to Marvel Studios, who will “reboot” the series at some point in the future, and Marvel Studios has a much better rep with fans than Fox, which destroyed the Fantastic Four franchise, even before it ran the once-promising X-Men franchise into the ground. Fox had also worked the “Dark Phoenix” storyline (in less than sterling fashion) into X-Men: The Last Stand, before tapping it once again for Dark Phoenix.
Dark Phoenix opened in every major world market except japan, earning $107 million ($45 million of that came from China). Given a domestic performance under $100 million, Dark Phoenix will need at least a $550-600 million worldwide total just to break even given the film’s massive ($200 million) production cost."