Fox's X-Men: Dark Phoenix lost the most money of any movie released in 2019. The conclusion to the X-Men: First Class series, Dark Phoenix was the last mainline X-Men movie Fox completed prior to being bought by Disney. It opened in June 2019 to generally negative reviews and was criticized for its lackluster execution across the board. If that wasn't troubling enough, it was also the studio's second adaptation of the acclaimed Dark Phoenix Saga comic book storyline after 2006's much-derided X-Men: The Last Stand (which was even written by Dark Phoenix writer-director Simon Kinberg).
Due to the unflattering early word of mouth, box office projections were pretty low heading into Dark Phoenix's opening weekend. In spite of that, the film still bombed harder than expected, setting an all-time low for Fox's X-Men franchise in the process. Shortly after, it was predicted the movie would ultimately cost Fox somewhere in the vicinity of $100-120 million. Unfortunately, the final loss was even worse.
Per Deadline, Dark Phoenix posted a total loss of $133 million after topping out at $252 million at the global box office (another all-time low for the X-Men movies). Overall, it lost more money than any other film released last year, including notorious commercial bombs like Terminator: Dark Fate (which lost $122.6 million), Cats ($113.6 million), and Gemini Man ($111.1 million).
Combined with the reviews, Dark Phoenix's box office loss can be attributed to a perfect storm of factors. For starters, its budget rose to $200 million after substantial reshoots (which included re-filming its entire climax) and the movie was subsequently delayed from November 2018 to the following February. It was thereafter delayed again (against its producers' wishes) to June to accommodate Fox's Alita: Battle Angel, which only further damaged its efforts at building hype and increased the negative buzz surrounding the project. Of course, all of this was happening while Disney was in the process of finalizing its purchase of Fox, so the latter studio wasn't exactly focused on making sure Dark Phoenix turned out well.
There were other problems which impacted Dark Phoenix in a creative sense - namely, it was originally written as two movies before Fox decided to condense it into a single film - and, as has been pointed out before, there arguably wasn't a whole lot of fan interest in another take on the Dark Phoenix Saga following The Last Stand. Finally, for many filmgoers, 2017's Logan felt like the true conclusion to Fox's mainline X-Men movies, so there was never all that much excitement for Dark Phoenix from the get-go. Add it all together and the result is the biggest box office bomb of 2019. It's little wonder Disney and Marvel Studios are planning to reboot the characters for the MCU after that.
Source: Deadline