10 Movie Franchises Ruined By One Dumb Decision

3. Hiring Simon Kinberg - X-Men

The X-Men franchise has made many dubious decisions over the years, such as allowing the highly suspect Bryan Singer to continue working on the franchise until just recently, its hilariously confused approach to character continuity (especially where ageing is concerned), and worst of all, giving writer-director-producer Simon Kinberg way too much creative rein.

Kinberg started out his X-Men tenure as a co-writer on X-Men: The Last Stand, generally agreed to be one of the worst X-Men movies, horribly botching its adaptation of the beloved Dark Phoenix Saga.

Kinberg did admittedly bounce back by writing one of the series' best entries, X-Men: Days of Future Past, but given that the story was co-written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn - the major creative forces behind X-Men: First Class - it's easy to believe they did most of the heavy lifting for him.

Next up, he wrote the execrable X-Men: Apocalypse, a deeply soulless superhero tentpole which underwhelmed at the box office.

But with Bryan Singer's position in the franchise no longer tenable, Kinberg was inexplicably handed the reins to direct a second attempt at adapting the Dark Phoenix Saga.

For his directorial debut Dark Phoenix, with nobody else sharing a writing or story credit, Kinberg was handed a $200 million budget and bungled the beloved comic run for a second time, bringing the X-Men franchise to a most unceremonious end as Fox was acquired by Disney.

But the truth is that Kinberg's bland X-Men scripts contributed to a growing audience apathy regarding these movies, and the only films in the franchise to flourish recently have been the likes of Logan and Deadpool, which were only tacitly linked to the core continuity.