The mutants absolutely could join the billion dollar club. Just because the Fox movies have never made it past 700m doesn't mean Marvel's take won't ever cross it. We only have ever had one example of a cinematic X-Men franchise to compare and it's grown stale and never evolved with the times. If Marvel can make a Guardians of the Galaxy movie make over 800m at the box-office, they can do the same for the X-Men. Maybe not in the first movie but after the X-Men are firmly established In the MCU. By the second film, I could see the brand being stronger than it ever has been in the last 13 years.
That's how I see it too. One great and well budgeted film that shows that it's very different to what came before, obviously in new hands and also under the MCU umbrella, could have a top end in that ballpark. And regardless will massively boost the reputation of the franchise and make it seem almost like a new one in audience eyes. Spider-man doesn't look all that different in the 3 versions we've seen, but with the X-Men you can change half the characters and make the ones you do reuse look strikingly different and have much better looking powers (which hopefully work together much better too like we saw in the Titan scenes in IW). Differentiating will be very important once again.
DoFP has already made around $750m so there is surely room for growth. I thought that was a very good film so a very good MCU film along with MCU backing and links (so many cameo opportunities to build it up too), can do more than that 8 or so years later.
There is only so much you can change with iterations of Spidey, and in the suit he looks probably indistinguishable to many of the GA. With the X-Men you can change half the team completely, and as many of them haven't done much with their powers so far, there is opportunity to give a much bigger visual bang for buck with characters like Rogue and Iceman unrecognisable from their Fox version. Are there many people expecting a sure fire billion? I'm late to the conversation but I think over DoFP up to $1B is reasonable to expect. $750m is median territory for MCU films, which includes many solo character films and many old films which came out when the market was smaller. I'd consider that to be the baseline for a good MCU X-Men film.
That's exactly how I want them to do it.
The ceiling for new Spidey films didn't need to move up as much because the original films were record breakers that left a very wide audience very satisfied. The only reason to move it up at all would be inflation and growth in overseas markets. For X-Men that kind of audience fulfilment hasn't yet occurred and even after nearly 20 years many/most of the actual X-Men haven't been given the chance that Marvel seems to give to even lower tier characters. I think the ceiling is going to be significantly higher but to start with it might be slow till the X-Men get more and more entrenched in the MCU.
