X-men: Dark Phoenix Bombs
Takes a disastrous $14 million on opening Friday after costing $200 million to make
X-men: Dark Phoenix is on track to have the worst opening in the history of the franchise. The movie collected just $14 million on Friday, making it the lowest debut ever for an X-men movie, reports Variety on Saturday.
The Simon Kinberg-directed
Phoenix, which cost $200 million to make, was initially projected to gross $50–60 million with the studio expecting a $40–50 million debut.
The seventh and final project in the main X-men series was beaten at the box-office by The Secret Life of Pets
2, reports Forbes on Saturday; the animated sequel from Illumination will easily finish no. 1 with a three-day tally of $46.1 million
Dark Phoenix stars Sophie Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain,
Michael Fassbender and James
Mcavoy. It has a 20% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Stars Sophie Turner and Jessica Chastain revealed that they pranked actor James Mcavoy with the Macarena on set. The X-men: Dark Phoenix actresses explained that they noticed their co-star wasn’t in the best mood one day during filming, and so they convinced the stunt team controlling him with wires to make him perform the dance to the 1993 pop hit while he was suspended in midair.
Sophie told Collider: ‘James was in a bit of grump, as he always is - no, he’s not. He was in a bit of a grump one day, so Jess and I decided that he needed cheering up. ‘So he was on wires for this scene, and we decided that we wanted to have the Macarena play on the sound system, and the stunt guys would kind of puppeteer him as a surprise. It was a good prank!’ Jessica added that it seemed to do the trick, and he learned not to be ‘grumpy again’.