How Dark Phoenix & Others Show Big IP's Do Not Gaurantee Success

The latest (and last) instalment in the Fox/Marvel X-Men franchise, Dark Phoenix, debuted to a less-than-super $33m in North America and $136m worldwide, becoming the lowest opening weekend for an X-Men film. For a film with a production budget close to $200m, the opening weekend is a disaster for the studio and is expected to lose the studio a lot of money. As someone who thought the film wasn’t all that bad, it’s a sad way for this incarnation of the X-Men to bow out, especially as I am huge fan of both McAvoy and Fassbender’s portrayal of Professor X and Magneto.

But as we’ve come to see in this early summer season, Dark Phoenix becomes the latest in a growing list of sequels and big-budget IP films to underperform. Secret Life of Pets 2 opened this weekend to $47m, under half of what the first film debuted with. Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Detective Pikachu, Hellboy, and Shazam also opened a lot lower than projected, and have since gone onto underperform. All these films are either sequels/well known IP/part of a big franchise, yet all have done significantly worse than expected. Like Dark Phoenix, it’s more proof that IP and brand name alone does not guarantee box office success.
Audiences are more intelligent than ever, so any miss-step the studio makes will affect the final box office takings. Each of the films mentioned above underperformed due to their own unique scenarios:
  • Dark Phoenix was coming off a not-so-great X-Men: Apocalypse, and the film itself was poorly reviewed.
  • The marketing for Secret Life of Pets 2 did not capture our imagination like its predecessor did.
  • Shazam was a relatively unknown superhero, even though it was tied into the DCEU.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters had fantastic marketing, but a mixed audience response to Godzilla (2014), plus mixed reviews led to it opening to only $47m.
The bottom line is studios need to think carefully before putting big-budget films based on popular IP into production, especially with sequels. Just because one film does well, does not mean it can spawn a franchise. The most important task is to make the best film possible  - and even that doesn’t guarantee success. Understanding audience/critic reactions, general perception around the IP, and sensible budgeting can be the difference between a smash hit or a box office bomb.

Sometimes things just do not work out, even when the studio does everything exactly right. But as we’ve seen with a number of films above including Dark Phoenix, the studio could have taken steps to ensure it performed better than it did. Every studio is looking for the next big IP, but it takes more than just a well-known name to make money.


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