It’s often said that success has many fathers but failure is an orphan. That adage holds true for many Hollywood flops, but not for X-Men: Dark Phoenix, after director Simon Kinberg said he’ll take the blame for the film’s poor critical and commercial performance.
Dark Phoenix was Kinberg’s debut as a director, after more than a decade of writing and producing X-Men films. It opened last weekend with $33 million at the US box office, the lowest debut of any X-Men movie, and it holds a disappointing 43% score on Metacritic.
This week, he gave an unusually frank interview to KCRW‘s The Business podcast, in which he spoke about what went wrong. He said that he likes the film and had an “amazing time” making it, but reshoots and shifting release dates made things difficult.
In spite all of this, Kinberg said that the buck should stop with him. “I’m here, I’m saying when a movie doesn’t work, put it on me,” he told The Business. “I’m the writer-director, the movie didn’t connect with audiences, that’s on me.”
Dark Phoenix had a notoriously difficult journey to the screen. The whole third act was scrapped and reshot, reportedly to avoid similarities with Captain Marvel, and there are even rumours that Jessica Chastain‘s character was given a new back-story in post-production.
Would things have been different without all the meddling? Kinberg is unwilling to speculate, saying:
“I mean honestly, there’s no way to know. And that’s the thing that I think can drive people crazy and keep them up and be thinking about a movie’s failure years later. If the lesson you’ve learned is that you had the wrong date or you didn’t have good marketing – that’s not a lesson.”
You can check out more of the interview here. Dark Phoenix is in cinemas in Australia now.
