The Flash hasn't had a great week so far but there's good and bad news heading into the weekend.
Despite speculation that the DC Comics adaptation might slip to #2 in North America behind Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Deadline's latest update suggests that it should remain at #1.
That's the good news, but the bad is it's currently eyeing an awful $16.5 million - $24.7 million second weekend. As of now, that suggests a second-weekend decline of 55% - 70%, bringing an end to the debate of whether The Flash is going to have the same legs as 2018's Aquaman, for example.
The trade compares The Flash's current performance to 2011's Green Lantern. Both movies had $200 million production budgets, and if the Ezra Miller-led blockbuster performs the same way that critically panned effort did over a decade ago, then its domestic box office run could wrap up somewhere around the $116.5 million mark.
Rumour has it Warner Bros. spent as much as $150 million on marketing (Tom Cruise clearly doesn't come cheap...), so there's no way The Flash is going to turn a profit at this stage. Miracles do happen, but David Zaslav probably wishes he had a time machine right about now, particularly as it would have been easy for him to shrug off a flop that was from the previous regime.
Instead, the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO chose to hype it up as the best superhero movie he's ever seen, a claim which fans and insiders alike have since scoffed at.
"Far from the greatest superhero movie ever made and not quite among the worst," I said in my review, "The Flash is still another mediocre effort from the DCEU with appalling VFX and a messy story that the excellent Michael Keaton and Sasha Calle alone are unable to save."
The Flash is now playing in theaters.