Dark Phoenix: 10 Ways It's The Worst X-Men Film Yet

A miserable send-off to one of the superhero genre's biggest franchises.

by Ewan Paterson
Dark Phoenix Poster
20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox's Dark Phoenix draws to a close two decade's worth of X-Men movies. Unfortunately, it's a film X-fans will struggle to find redeeming features in, as Simon Kinberg's film squanders its source material with a half-baked adaptation that fails to entertain even on the most basic level.

Dark Phoenix is bad, and almost certainly the worst X-Men film yet. It's even more unfortunate that, despite the film releasing to a general sense of apathy from X-Men fans - with the team sure to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the coming years - it still manages to find a way to disappoint; the franchise has bowed out in potentially the most unceremonious way it could have.

It's a huge shame, even if the series had started to lag behind Marvel Studios' efforts with the release of 2016's Apocalypse. For all the faults of Fox's X-Men films, they still managed to deliver some seminal moments in superhero fiction, with Days of Future Past and Logan both comfortably sitting at the top tier of comic book movies. Dark Phoenix, on the other hand, does anything but, and even manages to distinguish itself as a less entertaining film than some of the more miserly offerings in the franchise, such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and 2006's The Last Stand.

The fourth entry in Fox's First Class series is messy, meandering, and likely even the worst X-Men film to date. There's no way it should've been this bad, and yet...

SPOILERS AHEAD!

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.