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The biggest box-office bombs of 2019, from Cats to Gemini Man

AP
AP

The five biggest box-office bombs of last year have been revealed, with the much-derided X-Men: Dark Phoenix taking the top spot.

The team at Deadline worked out the films with the worst losses of 2019 and found that five movies took the dubious honour.

Missing Link, an animated film with an all-star voice cast including Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, David Walliams, Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, Timothy Olyphant, Emma Thompson and Zach Galifianakis, came in at the bottom of the list with a reported total loss of $133m (£107m).

This was followed by Will Smith’s much-hyped Gemini Man, about an elite assassin who realises he’s being hunted by a younger, faster clone of himself. As well as being critically panned, the film made a total loss of $111.1m (£89.2m)

It won’t come as a surprise that Cats, another film with an all-star cast that failed to resonate with audiences, made a significant loss, of $113.6m (£91.2m). Despite its cast including critics’ favourites such as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, the film was a critical and commercial disaster, and received some of the most brutal reviews of any movie in recent years.

In second place was Terminator: Dark Fate, with a reported total loss of $122.6m (£98.4m), but the clear “winner” was X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which cost 20th Century Studios and Disney a total loss of $133m (£106.8m).

A review for The Independent gave Dark Phoenix, starring Sophie Turner and James McAvoy, two stars.

“The latest X-Men film risks short-circuiting thanks to its own overabundance of special effects,” the review said.

“The many scenes of characters being consumed by fireballs or crumbling to dust or being hurled backwards by the lightning-like force in the X-Men’s fingertips become increasingly dreary. This is a young adult drama as much as it is a sci-fi film but doesn’t have anything very fresh to say about the trauma of adolescence as experienced by mutant superheroes.”

Read the detailed breakdown by Deadline here.

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