10 Movie Franchises That Destroyed Themselves With ONE Decision

Now to be clear, Fox's X-Men series was likely always going to come to an end when Disney acquired the studio, but it at least could've gone out with a dignified farewell had Fox not continually employed the services of writer-director-producer Simon Kinberg.

Kinberg has his fingerprints over four X-Men movies to date, yet the only one of which was any good - X-Men: Days of Future Past - also had its story co-written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn, who previously penned X-Men: First Class. That says it all, really.

Elsewhere, Kinberg wrote the dreadful X-Men: The Last Stand and the dull, distended X-Men Apocalypse, before inexplicably being given the reins to both write and direct the series' final mainline film, Dark Phoenix.

It doesn't take a business genius to presume that giving a $200 million movie to a first-time director - adapting a story he botched previously, no less - was a bad idea, and to the surprise of nobody, Dark Phoenix cratered both critically and commercially.

There was a faint sliver of possibility that some aspects of this continuity could've been folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe had it retained any semblance of quality in its later years, but alas, Kinberg struck out again and again.